Scrum History

Industries, both IT and non-IT, have undergone a Scrum revolution in the recent past. What started as a way of process simplification in a collaborative environment became an industry-wide phenomenon. Today, Scrum is a household name in the largely matured corporate ecosystem. The history of Scrum has a lot to unfold about the origin, evolution, and the progressive development of the framework.

1993: A Year of First Scrum

Looking back at Scrum, it was first implemented in 1993 by Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna at the Easel Corporation. They drew these concepts from the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article “The New New Product Development Game (1986)”, wherein Takeuchi and Nonaka compared new approaches with a game called Rugby. In this game, a whole team tries to surround a ball, disallowing it to pass back and forth.
The article ‘The New New Product Development Game’ describes how companies like Honda, Canon, and Fuji-Xerox have generated superior results using a scalable, team-based technique in product development. Also, this article laid stress on self-organized teams and the role of management in the development process. This article, essentially, gave birth to the concept called ‘Scrum’.

1995: Introduced “The Scrum Development Process” Paper

In 1995, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber jointly presented a first public appearance of their paper called “The Scrum Development Process” at Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) Conference, 1995 in Austin, Texas.

2001: Introduced “Agile Manifesto” Guide

In 2001, Sutherland, Schwaber, and fifteen associates got together in Snowbird, Utah, and drew the Agile Manifesto, which then turned into an invitation for software engineers to take action to form a unique method of developing software. From that time onwards, Sutherland, Schwaber, and a community of Scrum practitioners have started not only implementing Scrum framework but also producing millions of high-performing teams in organizations globally.

2002: Formed “Scrum Alliance” Organization

In 2002, Ken Schwaber founded an organization ‘Scrum Alliance’ with Mike Cohn and Esther Derby. Ken Schwaber headed the organization and in the following years they developed and launched the highly successful Certified Scrum Master (CSM) program.

2014: Presented “The Value of Scrum to Organizations”

In 2014, Dr. Dave Cornelius, the globally recognized Lean and Agile catalyst, presented his doctoral research based on the Scrum value and named it as a “The Value of Scrum to Organizations”.

2016: Formed First Fully Scalable Scrum

The journey of Scrum continues to evolve. They recognized the need for a framework for distributed teams and two Product Owners:
1. For strategic prioritization with the Stakeholders and
2. For prioritization with the team

Today, an increasing number of IT and non-IT companies have started using Scrum practices for software development. You can see the graph showing comparison between the Traditional methodologies and Scrum practices. Clearly, it has changed the way of working in the corporates.

Scrum has undoubtedly brought agility to the people, teams, and organizations around the world.