Scrum, what’s in a name?
Let’s travel to the past and see the first resources of Scrum.
The term ‘Scrum’ was first used by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, two acknowledged management thinkers, in their ground-breaking 1986 paper ‘The New Product Development Game’ (Takeuchi & Nonaka, 1986).
With the term ‘Scrum’ they 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.
One of the key points of the HBR article; companies should focus on delivering products more quickly. The two professors who wrote the article thought that it was a competitive advantage for companies to be able to deliver products much more quickly.
Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber (writers of the Scrum Guide) conceived the Scrum process for Agile software development in the early 90’s. They presented Scrum for the first time in 1995 at the Oopsla conference in Austin, Texas (US) (Schwaber, 1995; Sutherland, 1995). They inherited the name ‘Scrum’ from the paper by Takeuchi and Nonaka.
Scrum sees itself as an empirical process control that could be used for many types of products, but extreme programming was designed explicitly for software development.
The overall complexity is a function of these variables :
complexity = f(development environment variables + target environment variables)
where these variables may and do change during the course of the project. As the complexity of the project increases, the greater the need for controls, particularly the ongoing assessment and response to risk.
An approach is needed that enables development teams to operate adaptively within a complex environment using imprecise processes. Complex system development occurs under rapidly changing circumstances.
The primary difference between the defined (waterfall, spiral and iterative) and empirical (SCRUM) approach is that The SCRUM approach assumes that the analysis, design, and development processes in the Sprint phase are unpredictable.
Thanks for reading!
Further Reading:
Scrum Development Process by Ken Schwaber- 1995
Harvard Business Review article “The New New Product Development Game- 1986
