The Five Scrum Values

Scrum has five values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. Learn what each one means in practice and how a retrospective brings them to life.

The five Scrum values are Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. They were added to the Scrum Guide to capture the mindset and behaviour that make the framework actually work. The roles and ceremonies describe what a Scrum team does; the values describe how it should do it — and without them, the mechanics of Scrum are just empty ritual.

The five Scrum values explained

Commitment — Team members personally commit to the Sprint Goal and to each other. Commitment in Scrum is about dedicating yourself to the team’s shared aims and doing your best to achieve them, not about over-promising on scope.

Focus — Everyone focuses on the work of the Sprint and the Sprint Goal. Focus means resisting distraction and the temptation to spread effort across too many things at once, so the team makes real progress on what matters most.

Openness — The team and its stakeholders are open about the work and the challenges. Openness means being transparent about progress, surfacing problems early rather than hiding them, and being receptive to new ideas and feedback.

Respect — Team members respect each other as capable, independent people. Respect means valuing different skills, perspectives, and backgrounds, and assuming good intent — the foundation of any healthy team.

Courage — The team has the courage to do the right thing and to tackle hard problems. Courage means raising uncomfortable truths, challenging the status quo, admitting mistakes, and committing to difficult work.

Why the Scrum values matter

It is entirely possible to run every ceremony, fill every role, and still have Scrum fail. The difference between teams that improve and teams that go through the motions is almost always the values. Commitment and Focus drive real progress; Openness, Respect, and Courage build the trust a team needs to be honest about what is going wrong and brave enough to change it. The values are what make continuous improvement possible.

How the retrospective brings the values to life

The Sprint Retrospective is where the Scrum values are most visible — and most tested. It takes Courage to raise a problem honestly, Openness to share what really happened, and Respect to listen to a teammate’s perspective without blame. A retrospective run with these values produces honest insight and real action; one run without them produces silence and “everything’s fine.” This is why building psychological safety matters so much — it is the soil the values grow in.

Many teams go a step further and periodically run a retrospective focused specifically on the values, scoring how well the team is living each one and discussing where to improve. You can run a Scrum Values retrospective for exactly this, or track the values over time with a team health check. If you would rather start by reflecting on your own practice, the Scrum Master self-assessment quiz is a quick way in.

Frequently asked questions about the Scrum values

What are the five Scrum values?

The five Scrum values are Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. They were added to the Scrum Guide to describe the behaviour and mindset that make the Scrum framework work. Where the events and roles describe what a team does, the values describe how it should do it.

Why are the Scrum values important?

The Scrum values are what turn the mechanics of Scrum into an effective way of working. A team can run every ceremony and fill every role and still fail if it is not committed, focused, open, respectful, and courageous. The values build the trust that lets a team be transparent about problems and brave enough to change — which is exactly what continuous improvement depends on.

How does a retrospective reflect the Scrum values?

The Sprint Retrospective is where the Scrum values are most visible. It takes Courage to raise a problem honestly, Openness to share what really happened, and Respect to listen without blame. A well-run retrospective both depends on these values and strengthens them, which is why many teams periodically run a retrospective focused specifically on the Scrum values themselves.

Who created the Scrum values?

The Scrum values are defined in the Scrum Guide, authored by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the co-creators of Scrum. The five values — Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage — were formally added to the Scrum Guide in its 2016 revision and remain part of the framework today.