History Of Scrum
Scrum was first implemented in 1993 by Jeff Sutherland and others at the Easel Corporation. They drew concepts from the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, The New New Product Development Game (Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. 1986). The article describes how companies, including Honda, Canon, and Fuji-Xerox, had generated superior results using a scalable, team-based technique in product development.
Self-organising, cross-functional teams were empowered to work towards achieving goals. Although the examples cited in the article were outside the software industry, they inspired those building software to experiment with the same concepts to see whether they could help in similar ways in this domain.
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland worked on Scrum until 1995, when they co-presented Scrum at the OOPSLA Conference. This presentation detailed the learning that Ken and Jeff gained over the previous few years and made public the first formal definition of Scrum.
In the years following its presentation at the OOPSLA Conference, many people began to adopt and use Scrum. As the volume of people using it increased, so did the confusion about what Scrum was. As a result, Ken and Jeff collaborated to produce the Scrum Guide; the first version was released in 2010. The Scrum Guide documents Scrum as developed, evolved, and sustained for 20-plus years by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber.
Millions of people worldwide now use Scrum to develop products & services, and the usage of Scrum continues to increase. The most recent major trend has seen Scrum grow beyond its software development origins. In my public Scrum training courses, it is now common for up to 50% of the people to come with interests beyond software, including, but not limited to, Pharmaceuticals, Construction, HR, and Marketing. The world is becoming more complex, and more people are turning to Scrum to help them control complex work and deliver value.
The latest update to the Scrum Guide in November 2020 reflected this trend by seeking to simplify Scrum for people outside of software. Language tying Scrum to I.T. was removed. Other concepts were simplified, and many practices were removed to make Scrum even more of a framework than ever before.