History

The roots of Scrum are found in a well-known article summarizing common best practices in 10 innovative Japanese companies, "The New New Product Development Game," Harvard Business Review, Jan 1986, by Takeuchi and Nonaka. It introduced the terms Sashimi (slices) for IID, and Scrum for the adaptive and self-directed team practices. The name was taken from the game of rugby, for the adaptive team behavior moving a ball up the field.

Jeff Sutherland is one of the Scrum creators and was VP at Easel Corporation in 1994 when he introduced some of its practices; he had read the article. He was also influenced by a report on a hyper-productive project at Borland Corporation that effectively used structured daily meetings [Coplien94]. In 1995 Ken Schwaber worked with Sutherland at Easel on the formalization of Scrum. Their results were described in a workshop paper [Schwaber95]. In 1996 Sutherland joined Individual Inc., and asked Ken Schwaber to assist in the adoption of Scrum ideas. Schwaber refined and extended Scrum, in collaboration with Sutherland, into the versions ultimately described in [BDSSS98] and [SB02].