The Nexus Framework

Nexus was developed by Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org — the same people behind Scrum. It is deliberately minimal: Nexus adds exactly one new accountability (the Nexus Integration Team), a handful of extended events, and a few additional artifacts. Everything else is standard Scrum.

The core insight of Nexus is that the primary challenge of scaling Scrum is managing dependencies — dependencies in requirements, domain knowledge, and software/code. When these dependencies are minimized and managed, multiple teams can deliver a single, integrated product increment every Sprint.

Nexus preserves and enhances Scrum’s foundational bottom-up intelligence and empiricism. It does not add management layers, coordination roles, or ceremony overhead. Instead, it creates transparency around dependencies and provides accountability for integration.

Nexus is founded on the same empirical process control theory as Scrum — transparency, inspection, and adaptation. At scale, the impact of incomplete transparency or flawed decisions is magnified, making empiricism even more critical.

The NIT consists of the Product Owner, a Scrum Master, and one or more Integration Team Members. These members may also be members of individual Scrum Teams, but their NIT membership takes precedence — ensuring integration issues are resolved first.

Nexus events extend, wrap around, or replace Scrum events to serve both the overall Nexus and each individual team. All teams share a common Sprint.

Nexus extends Scrum’s artifacts with a few additions that create transparency around cross-team coordination and integration.

Nexus provides patterns for managing the primary scaling challenges: dependency reduction, cross-team refinement, integration automation, and organizational alignment.