Scrum artifacts are a way of thinking about the work that is being done or needs to be done by a scrum team. The main shared characteristic of scrum artifacts is that they are really, really visible. So all the stakeholders involved in a project can see how work is being done. What has priority and what the outcome of any given sprint will be. There are three artifacts. The product backlog, the sprint backlog and the increment.

So lets go through each of them, one at a time. The product backlog is owned by the product owner, and is generally made up of things like epics, user stories, tasks, bugs and other things like that, but essentially these are all things that represent work to be done.

The ones I'll focus on in this video, are epics and user stories. So epics are large amounts of work that can be broken down into lots of smaller user stories, tasks, et cetera. User stories on the other hand are that smaller piece of work that stands on its own, and in fact the best way to think of these, are as simple stories that tell the development team more about why they need to create a specific product or service. So it really gives them the context they need in order to understand the requirements, but also the flexibility to choose how they go about achieving that story. User stories should help a team understand the need for a certain product or service, but exactly what that product or service needs to look like, is still up to the development team.

Development teams are self organising units. So they need to decide how they will approach any user story and the best way they can solve that need. Next up the sprint backlog which is owned and forecast by the development team during the sprint planning session. They look at the product backlog and say; "All right, we believe we can achieve X, Y and Z, by the end of this sprint. So we'll pull in all those epics or user stories or whatever into the sprint backlog." This can obviously be quite difficult and teams tend to get better estimating what work can be pulled into a sprint backlog over time. The important thing is that teams have a way to decide together if a product backlog item is ready to pulled into the sprint backlog.

The last scrum artifact that I'd like to talk about, is the increment, and this is really quite simple actually. An increment is just all of the work that has been completed during a sprint plus all of the related work that was done in a previous sprint. Work can only be included in an increment though, if it is done, but when is work done? Well work is done when the organisation says it's done, but if this doesn't come from the organisation, then the team agrees that it's done. So as a team, you need to create a common understanding of what done means for you, because teams are self organising and everyone is doing different kinds of work, it is really important that teams have that discussion and understand what they believe done looks like. And this is really important for two reasons: Firstly, because a loathsome to deliver the increment at the end of the sprint, and secondly so that they can properly estimate the effort for future work. There are a few general ideas a lot of teams use, to help them define that. Like the acceptance criteria being met, a p.o being signed off or, the audit being signed off. In the end it's up to the scrum team to decide what done looks like.

That's it for this video. Basically there are three scrum artifacts. The product backlog, sprint backlog and the increment. Each of these has quite a few elements and to be an effective scrum team, you need to master all of them.