Scrum (development) - History

History

Scrum was first defined as "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal" as opposed to a "traditional, sequential approach" in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the "New New Product Development Game".

Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka later argued in "The Knowledge Creating Company" that it is a form of "organizational knowledge creation, especially good at bringing about innovation continuously, incrementally and spirally".

The authors described a new approach to commercial product development that would increase speed and flexibility, based on case studies from manufacturing firms in the automotive, photocopier and printer industries. They called this the holistic or rugby approach, as the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team across multiple overlapping phases, where the team "tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth".

In rugby football, a scrum refers to the manner of restarting the game after a minor infraction. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used what would become Scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods, and Jeff Sutherland, with John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna, developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, and were the first to refer to it using the single word Scrum.

In 1995, Sutherland and Schwaber jointly presented a paper describing the Scrum methodology at the Business Object Design and Implementation Workshop held as part of Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications '95 (OOPSLA '95) in Austin, Texas, its first public presentation. Schwaber and Sutherland collaborated during the following years to merge the above writings, their experiences, and industry best practices into what is now known as Scrum.

In 2001, Schwaber worked with Mike Beedle to describe the method in the book Agile Software Development with Scrum.

Its approach to planning and managing projects is by bringing decision-making authority to the level of operation properties and certainties.

Although the word is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to spell it with capital letters as SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber's early papers, which capitalized SCRUM in the title.

According to the 7th Annual State of Agile Development Survey, scrum or variants of scrum are still the most popular agile methodologies used. Out of the 4,048 software professionals that responded, 72% are practicing scrum or some kind of hybrid.