Scrum is an iterative and incremental Agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal. Scrum is an agile way to manage a project, usually software development. In the Scrum world, instead of providing complete detailed descriptions about how everything is to be done on a project, much of it is left up to the software development team. This is because the team will know better how to solve the problem they are presented with.
Scrum relies on a self-organizing, cross-functional team. The Scrum team is self-organizing in that there are no overall team leaders who decide which person will be doing which task and how the problem will be solved. Those are issues that are decided by the team as a whole.
Scrum was conceived by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s, who published a paper to describe the process. The term “scrum” is borrowed from the game of rugby to stress the importance of teams, and illustrates some analogies between team sports 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 (small, self-organizing groups 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 move towards their shared objective.
Teams require autonomy to achieve excellence. The Scrum framework for software development implements these principles for developing and sustaining complex software projects. In February of 2001, Jeff and Ken were among 17 software development leaders who created a manifesto for Agile software development.
In 2002, Ken Schwaber founded the Scrum Alliance with Mike Cohn and Esther Derby, with Ken chairing the organization. In the years to follow, the highly successful, certified Scrum Master programs and its derivatives were created and launched In 2006. Jeff Sutherland created his own company, Scrum Inc., while continuing to offer and teach certified Scrum courses. Ken left the Scrum Alliance in the fall of 2009 and founded scrum.org to further improve the quality and effectiveness of Scrum, mainly through the Professional Scrum series. With the first publication of the Scrum Guide in 2010, and its incremental updates in 2011 and 2013, Jeff and Ken established a globally recognized body of knowledge.
