Chapter 90. The Origins of Scrum Might Not Be What You Think They Are

Rafael Sabbagh

If Scrum was applied to software development, it would go something like this: ...you form a team by carefully selecting one person from each [traditional development phase]...You then give them a description of the problem to be solved and...unsettle the team by saying that their job is to produce the system in, say, half the time and money and it must have twice the performance of other systems. Next, you say that how they do it is their business.

Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions, by Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl (Prentice Hall, 1990)

Scrum, the framework as we know it today, was officially presented to the public in 1995. It captured the way of working that Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber had developed starting in 1992. Sutherland and Schwaber frequently mention the article, “The New New Product Development Game,” published in 1986 by Takeuchi and Nonaka in Harvard Business Review.1 They refer to it as the main source of inspiration for the Scrum framework. These Japanese business professors had done extensive research in the field of companies developing new products (such as cars, printers, photocopiers, and personal computers). In the article, the authors used the analogy of a rugby game to describe how the development teams for new products in the more successful companies were working. At the heart of it was self-organization and the boundaries that help turn it into a success.

The word scrum, a rugby formation for putting the ball back into play, is used in the article as the metaphor. This is what inspired the creators of Scrum when naming the framework in 1995.

Or, so they say...

There are indications that Sutherland and Schwaber didn’t tell the whole story. The book Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions was published in 1990. As the earlier excerpt shows, it was this book that introduced the idea of applying the practices described by Takeuchi and Nonaka to software development. And it was in this same book that this new way of working was baptized as Scrum.

To be fair, it’s important to point out that the book doesn’t provide a detailed or usable method to put these ideas into practice. The authors explain why the waterfall model doesn’t work for software development, and they offer possible alternatives, among them (what they call) Scrum.

Sutherland and Schwaber drove forward the creation of the actual Scrum framework in the first half of the 1990s. They defined the rules, roles, events, and artifacts based on their work in practice. They’ve evolved and kept sustaining them since then and deserve all the credit for that.

Jeff Sutherland refers to Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions in at least two articles he wrote in the early days of Scrum.² He highlights this work as a major influence on the introduction of Scrum at Easel Corporation. Unfortunately, the authors of the book were never given the real credit they deserve, and their initial importance got lost over time. But they were the ones who first voiced the idea to apply the approach described by Takeuchi and Nonaka to software development, and they were the ones who actually baptized this approach as Scrum.

1 Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, “The New New Product Development Game,” Harvard Business Review, Jan. 1986, https://oreil.ly/kBq_y.

² Jeff Sutherland, “Agile Can Scale: Inventing and Reinventing SCRUM in Five Companies,” Cutter Business Technology Journal Vol. 14, 2001: pp. 5–11; and “Agile Development: Lessons Learned from the First Scrum,” Cutter Agile Project Management Advisory Service: Executive Update Vol. 5, No. 20, 2004: pp. 1–4.