Knowledge Base / Scrum artifacts and commitments
What are the Scrum artifacts and commitments?
An artifact in Scrum is created by the Scrum Team to represent work to be implemented, value to be created or value created. Scrum artifacts provide essential information for alignment among the Scrum Team members and, depending on the artifact, between them and other stakeholders. This transparency allows all those who are inspecting the artifact to use the same basis for adaptation (SCHWABER; SUTHERLAND, 2020).
Scrum defines the use of three artifacts: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment. Each Scrum artifact carries within it a commitment, which is a goal or a set of criteria to be met by the Scrum Team through the use or creation of the artifact itself. These commitments are defined at a high enough level that it is not determined how they will be carried out. In this way, they seek to stimulate empiricism. The Scrum Team maintains its focus on the commitment for each artifact and, in this way, has them as a reference during the execution of its work.
Each artifact provides enough information so that the progress in realizing its commitment can be understood. The commitment of the Product Backlog is the Product Goal, the commitment of the Sprint Backlog is the Sprint Goal, and the commitment of the Increment is the Definition of Done. I also add the Definition of Ready as another commitment of the Product Backlog.
Fun fact: commitments
The 2020 Scrum guide introduced the concept of commitment. With this addition, Scrum officially defined the Product Goal – which replaces the product vision concept already used by the community – and better fit the already known Sprint Goal and Definition of Done, now classified as commitments, and directly linked to artifacts.