Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile
software development methodology 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"[this quote needs a citation],
challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach"[this
quote needs a citation] to product development, and enables teams to
self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration
of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team
members and disciplines in the project.
A key principle of scrum is its recognition
that during production processes, the customers can change their minds about
what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that
unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive
or planned manner. As such, scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that
the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on
maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging
requirements.
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
Product Development Game. Takeuchi and 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 a tight-packed
formation of players with their heads down who attempt to gain possession of
the ball.)
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 to bring 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.
Later, Schwaber with others founded the Scrum
Alliance and created the Certified Scrum Master programs and its derivatives.
Schwaber left the Scrum Alliance in the fall of 2009, and founded Scrum.org
with Alex Armstrong to further improve the quality and effectiveness of scrum.
If you’d like to know about SCRUM Certification, go to www.leapuniversity.biz for more info.
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