Where does Scrum come from?
The first use of Scrum was led by Jeff Sutherland in 1993. Jeff worked at Easel Corporation, a software development company in Massachusetts (United States), and applied Scrum to the organization’s most critical project. Exceptional results were obtained with this new way of working.
In 1995, Jeff presented the first Scrum team to Ken Schwaber, who was CEO of the company Advanced Development Methods. Ken had been working with related ideas, focused on empirical approaches to software development. They worked together to create a formal definition of Scrum, presented by Ken at the 1995 conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) (SCHWABER, 1997).
Then Mike Beedle, an early adopter of Scrum in his work, led the effort to codify and standardize the framework, formally publishing it as an organizational standard (BEEDLE et al., 1999).
In 2001, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, as well as Mike Beedle, were signatories to the Agile Manifesto as representatives of Scrum (BECK et al., 2001). As I mentioned in the chapter What is Scrum? (see Scrum is agile), it was this manifesto that started the agile movement, of which Scrum is a part. That same year, Ken Schwaber published, in partnership with Mike Beedle, Agile software development with Scrum, the first book to describe the Scrum framework (SCHWABER; BEEDLE, 2002).
Fun fact: Jeff Sutherland in Rio de Janeiro
We received Dr. Jeff Sutherland as keynote speaker for the 2017 Rio de Janeiro Scrum Gathering.
I had the pleasure of guiding Jeff on his first day in town. I took him to lunch at an authentic Brazilian rodizio steakhouse and, after several glasses of prosecco offered by the restaurant, we headed to Sugarloaf Mountain, one of the city’s most famous tourist attractions. Finally, we ended the day with a coffee at the Confeitaria Colombo coffeehouse, near Copacabana beach.
During that time, we talked a lot about Scrum, of course, and his trajectory. I could see that Jeff, at the age of 76, was an extremely intelligent person, but at the same time humble and polite. Something that caught my attention was that he made a point of appreciating all the local dishes he tried and every new place he visited.
After that we hosted Jeff at my company’s headquarters for a very lively happy hour. And, unsurprisingly, his keynote address at the event was a huge success.