Origin

Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber conceived the Scrum process in the early 90’s. They codified Scrum in 1995 in order to present it at the Oopsla conference in Austin, Texas (US) and published the paper “SCRUM Software Development Process”.

Ken and Jeff inherited the name ‘Scrum’ from the 1986 groundbreaking paper ‘The New New Product Development Game’ by Takeuchi and Nonaka, two acknowledged management thinkers. With the term ‘Scrum’ Nonaka and Takeuchi referred to the game of rugby to stress the importance of teams and some analogies between a team sport like rugby and being successful in the game of new product development. The research described in their paper showed that outstanding performance in the development of new, complex products is achieved when teams, as small and self-organizing units of people, are fed with objectives, not with tasks. The best teams are those that are given direction within which they have room to devise their own tactics on how to best head towards their joint objective. Teams require autonomy to achieve excellence.

Learning It

Our recommended way of learning scrum is through…

* the best way to get properly informed about any Archetype is to find people who are actively using it and to ask them about their experiences.

Scrum Spine

From the perspective of prospective users of Scrum…

Need (Where might it be used?)

Scrum describes itself as:

A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Source: The Official Scrum Guide

Values (What does it optimise for?)

Source: The Official Scrum Guide

Principles (What is it based on?)

Though not in mentioned in the Official Scrum Guide, there are official sources that mention seven values:

  • Self-organization
  • Team size and composition
  • Done means done
  • Empowered Product Owners
  • Servant-leader Scrum Masters
  • Team ownership of adaptation
  • Delivery of business value

Source: “Scrum Reboot” Experience Report

Practices (What does it suggest you do?)

Tools (What does it suggest you use?)

Scrum does not explicitly recommend any Tools