Scaled Professional Scrum with Nexus Practices

Scrum is a framework from which process evolves. A Scrum Team or organization will build their process by assembling the proper
practices that they feel will help them succeed with Scrum at the heart.

Nexus extends Scrum to guide multiple Scrum Teams on how they need to work together to deliver working product in every Sprint. It
shows the journey these teams take as they come together, how they share work between teams, and how they manage and minimize
dependencies. In the Scaled Professional Scrum with Nexus course, students learn about many of the practices available to help their
teams better scale. The intent of the below chart is to help readers understand those practices and find ways to learn more.

Forming a Nexus - Organizing Teams

Forming a Nexus - Organizing Work
Running a Nexus
Managing a Nexus

Forming a Nexus - Organizing Teams

Practice Summary Why Use?

Start with a small A team scaling technique that starts with a small To help one team to become high-performing first, then
team, then grow team. As this team grows, the team splits and help another, then help another. Avoids the problem of
members move to start new teams. scaling mediocre team performance.

Internship Model A team scaling technique that preserves the original To share knowledge across teams and to instil a shared
team. Add new people to a high performance team, culture across teams when scaling the number of
then new people move to start their own teams. teams.

Feature Teams A team formation approach that consists of a cross- To give teams deeper insight into customer needs and
functional team that is able to pull, deliver, and to reduce waste and wait-time by reducing hand-offs of
 support an end-to-end feature. work to people outside the team.

Microservices An architectural style that organizes the architecture To improve the modularity of the code, which improves
of applications around a set of narrowly-focused, its maintainability, making it easier to change different
independently deployable services. parts of the code independently from other parts.

UI Drives Feature A team formation technique that uses the User To reduce cross-team dependencies, based on an
Areas Interface to identify areas of high cohesion and low assumption that different parts of the UI serve different
coupling, then form teams around these areas. needs and can be decoupled from other parts.

Persona Teams A team formation approach where teams form To give teams deeper insight into the users of an
around personas, which are fictionalized abstract application, which can help them feel more connected to
descriptions of types of users of the application. the user, which can help them build better solutions.

Feature Set Teams A team formation approach where teams form To scale feature teams by focusing on a consistent
around customer-facing product areas, which are customer experience in a domain area.
also known as value areas.

Team Self- A team formation technique where team members To increase the sense of team identification and reduce
Selection choose which team they join based on their team conflicts by empowering people to choose what
interests, their constraints, and the needs of the they work on and who they work with.
team.

Forming a Nexus - Organizing Work

Practice Summary Why Use?

Impact Mapping A planning technique that uses a visual map to help To understand the connection between PBIs and
communicate and connect business goals, personas, the product and business goals they satisfy.
outcomes, impacts, and Product Backlog Items (PBI)

User Story Mapping A planning technique that helps teams to decompose To provide a structured way to refine PBIs to flesh
user stories into manageable chunks of work by out an initial usable version of a product and then
visualizing user stories along two independent additional functionality.
dimensions.

Track Business-centric A planning technique that helps teams track business To ensure transparency and alignment of work
items in the Product centric items when decomposing the Product Backlog. that needs to be done to deliver business value
Backlog (e.g. development, marketing, support, etc.)

Cross-team A Refinement technique used by multiple teams working To improve the flow of work when multiple teams
Refinement together on one Product Backlog to reduce or eliminate are working together to build a single Product.
cross-team Product Backlog Item dependencies.

Create PBIs as "Thin" A planning technique to decompose and split Product To reduce the problem where PBIs are "undone"
as Possible Backlog Items along with their acceptance criteria. at the end of a Sprint and to minimize
dependencies.

Running a Nexus
Practice Summary Why Use?

Visualize your Work A strategy for making the status of, and progress To communicate and reduce misunderstandings about
on, Product Backlog Items visible and therefore the status of PBIs.
transparent.

Nexus Sprint Planning An approach for organizing the teams in Nexus To help improve collaboration during the Nexus Sprint
Room Layout Sprint Planning, including remote teams. Planning event.

Use the Nexus Sprint A technique for using the Nexus Sprint Backlog to To eliminate the need to use other artifacts to make
Backlog to Manage the visualize the status of, and progress on, PBIs, the work transparent by visualizing the sequence and
Flow of Work during the Sprint for the Nexus. dependencies of the PBIs forecast for the Sprint for
the Nexus.

Science Fair/Expo A set of related techniques that can help to To make running large Sprint Reviews more effective
improve the Sprint Review at scale by letting and engaging between the Development Teams and
stakeholders see what they want/need to see, on stakeholders.
demand, during the Nexus Sprint Review.

Offline Sprint Review A set of related techniques that enables teams to To improve the effectiveness of Sprint Reviews when
better engage with stakeholders when those stakeholders can't be present.
stakeholders cannot attend the Sprint Review.
either in-person or remotely.
Retrospective Board A set of techniques for making Sprint To make sure that Sprint Retrospectives items don't
Retrospective items transparent. get ignored or forgotten.

Build Experimentation A validation approach for evaluating alternatives To obtain product feedback from users; to better
into the Product using a released Product. understand whether the Product is meeting user
needs.

Build Manual Feedback Validation techniques for gathering interest and To obtain product feedback from users; to better
into the Product feedback from a released Product. understand whether the Product is meeting user
needs.

Build Automated A validation approach for using instrumentation in To obtain product feedback from users; to better
Feedback into the the application to gather information about usage. understand whether the Product is meeting user
Product needs.

Scaled Product An approach to scaling Product Ownership by To scale Product Ownership when there's too much
Ownership delegating some of the work of Product Ownership work for them to do, and they need help.
while still maintaining Product Owner
accountability.

Continuous Integration A development practice that requires developers to To discover coding and code integration problems as
integrate code into a shared repository several early as possible, while the code is still fresh in the
times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an developer's mind.
automated build and test process, allowing teams
to detect problems early.

Automated Acceptance An approach for using test automation to verify To reduce the level of manual effort that is required
Testing that requirements are met. to verify that requirements are being met.

Feature Toggles A technique that enables all work to be integrated To enable code to be integrated without introducing
regardless of feature readiness partially completed work by keeping the code "turned
off" until everything is ready for the feature to be
used.

Develop for Operations Techniques that improve the deployability and To improve the release readiness of a product by
supportability of applications making sure that all the work necessary to deploy
and support a PBI is completed in the same Sprint.

Track Operations / Techniques that improve the deployability and To improve the release readiness of a product by
Infrastructure Work in supportability of applications making sure that all the work necessary to deploy
the Product Backlog code related to a PBI is completed in the same Sprint.
Teams on Differing Techniques for synchronizing the work of multiple To handle the situation in which not all teams in the
Cadences teams in a Nexus when their Sprint lengths differ. Nexus cannot get PBIs to "done" at the same rate.
Especially relevant in mixed hardware/software
products, and products that require some work to be
done on legacy code.

Communities of A technique for forming and supporting groups of To share information across teams; to improve
Practice people with common interests, for the purpose of professionalism across teams.
sharing learnings and improving skills.

Track Architecture Work A technique that improves the resiliency and To improve the resiliency and reduce the total
in the Product Backlog reduce the total lifecycle cost of applications. lifecycle cost of applications.

Facilitate Shared A technique for refactoring and sharing To improve the resiliency and reduce the total
Architecture components across applications and teams. lifecycle cost of applications.

Internal Open Source A technique to enable multiple teams to make To move away from teams owning components to
(aka "Inner Source") changes to the same code at the same time. shared component ownership.

Managing a Nexus
Practice Summary Why Use?

Product A technique for visualizing the size and completeness To provide a way of visualizing the size/complexity of PBIs.
Backlog of PBIs. Also used to make the status of the work transparent.
Treemap

Feature A technique for visualizing the completeness of work To provide a way to visualize Done and Undone work for a
Burndown at the feature level. Sprint or for a release.

Health Check A technique for helping teams assess their own To provide a lightweight way for teams to self-diagnose
performance. challenges so that they can focus on improving the things
that will help them most.

World Café A facilitation technique for knowledge sharing in large To provide a way to share and discuss ideas in a large
groups by breaking them into smaller sub-groups, group environment.
 based on sub-topics, and rotating people through the
groups.

Open Spaces A facilitation technique for breaking into smaller To provide a a way to break into sub-groups to focus on
groups to discuss and focus on topics of interest ideas or problems when the entire group may not be
through self-organization. interested in every topic.

De-scaling A technique for restoring order to a Nexus that is To provide ways to simplify problems arising from having
struggling with scaling problems by reducing the scaled poorly or unnecessarily, especially situations in which
number of teams. the sheer numbers of people involved have become
destabilizing.

Scrumble A technique equivalent of "pulling the andon cord"; To deal with a situation in which the Nexus has become
stopping work and descaling until stability can be incapable of doing useful work, and all work needs to stop
restored to the Nexus. until order and coherency can be restored (if possible).

Distributed An approach for improving cohesiveness and building To improve and increase cross-team collaboration by
Teams Travel stronger working relationships with distributed teams. building personal relationships and creating a shared
culture across distributed teams.

Distributed A technique for using technology to improve the To make distributed collaboration more effective through
Tooling ability for distributed teams to work together. the appropriate use of distributed collaboration technology.