The Nexus Framework

Scaled Scrum with the Nexus framework is about helping 3+ Scrum teams work together effectively to develop a single product. Most commonly, this will be a software product.

Scaled Scrum and Nexus are designed to help us deal with the challenges of developing software with large numbers of people and multiple teams.

At the core of scaled Scrum is Nexus. Nexus is a lightweight framework to help us organise and coordinate our efforts in large-scale software development. Ken Schwaber describes Nexus as “the exoskeleton of scaled Scrum”.

As with the Scrum framework, the Nexus framework provides guidance about planning and reviewing our work and cultivating a culture of continuous improvement. It does this by guiding us on how and when to inspect and adapt using short Sprints with regular refinement, planning, reviews and retrospectives that result in an integrated Increment of potentially releasable software. Most importantly, it guides us in coordinating and managing the dependencies inherent in building a complex software product with multiple teams.

Scaled Scrum and Nexus is still Scrum, as you already know it. You still do all the good things you did with Scrum in the past. Nexus It extends Scrum with a selection of familiar new accountabilities, events and artifacts, combined with a range of good practices to assist you in your scaling efforts and give you a greater chance of success.

As with the Scrum framework, the Nexus framework does not seek to answer every question and solve every problem you will encounter when scaling your development efforts on a product with multiple Scrum Teams.

Scrum recognises that the challenges faced by each organisation seeking to develop software are different and unique. As such, any methodology that aims to answer questions that it does not already know and therefore cannot hope to respond effectively is likely to become hugely complex in itself and ultimately doomed to fail.

This is truer than ever when we operate at scale, hence the need for a framework and empiricism to help us find a solution that will work for each of us in our unique situation.

The challenges at scale are even more significant, and your situation is even more unique. The Nexus framework offers solutions to common and universal problems encountered when using Scrum at scale. It will set you up with a way of working so you can use empiricism to inspect and adapt to find solutions to your unique challenges.