The Birth of Scrum

Scrum comes forward as being used mainly among Agile management approaches. Being one of the plays of Rugby, Scrum has had an essential role in improving the effectiveness of organizations by the end of the 20th century, displaying the method to reach the goals as a team.

Rugby coming with little “madness”

Football was popular in the 19th century, and it prohibited players from touching the ball with their hands except for goalkeepers, as also known nowadays. In 1823, a student from Rugby School in England, William Web Ellis, captured the ball immediately with his hands affected by the chaotic view while watching football, whose purpose is to aim for more scores, and scored passing the goal line with all his best effort. Perhaps for enjoying himself, perhaps for only rebelling against the game in a revolutionary mood, even he, who had become a priest further years, did not believe himself to lay in the history. As put to touch the ball with hands, which is a taboo for football, to the center of the sport, Rugby became popular and spread to the World by bringing a different approach to the motivation of scoring more.

A new shape for development with Rugby

Rugby seated its rules even after its invention and eventually managed to go out of England soon. Nobody would have thought that the newly invented sport would have impacted a management mentality in the future. However, after one and a half-century, published in Harvard Business Review in 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka expressed that classical sequential development phases would tackle to fit the fastly developing and competitive environment of the 20th century. Instead of those which look like a relay race, they will refer to the Rugby game that composes a team movement from multidisciplinary members. The authors proved their thesis with examples from successful instances in the Japanese economy by foreseeing that the developer team should have autonomy and give importance to learning to achieve a better result. Moving together back and forth from beginning to end became the leading title for Scrum’s maturation in the following years. On the other hand, football was still super popular, and Argentina became World Champions through Maradona’s “Hand of God” that year. Even the “Mexican Wave” was invented, but at least for this article, we love Rugby more than football.

Scrum inspires Scrum

Scrum is observed frequently in Rugby matches. According to the Rugby Union rules, Scrum’s purpose is “restarting the game following an infringement or stoppage with a set piece.” As each of the eight players is bound opposite the other team and aims to move the ball forward incrementally, Scrum is pretty interesting, showing a theatrical representation of a team move and progressing with small steps.

In 1990, Peter DeGrace ve Leslie Hulet Stahl referred to Takeuchi and Nonaka while defining Scrum as an “all-at-once” software development model in their book, “Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions.” They presented Scrum with a Japanese model, Sashimi, as an alternative to the “Waterfall” approach by indicating pros and cons. In 1993, Scrum was first implemented at Easol Corporation under the leadership of Jeff Sutherland. Even though he never called the name “Scrum,” James Coplien was the pioneer in adding daily meetings to Scrum, indicating that developing “Borland Quattro Pro for Windows(QPW)” was tight before expected by making daily meetings considering all phases of activities with the team in 1994. It was time to be informative about the benchmark of Scrum with its alternatives in 1995. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber presented “The Scrum Development Process” at Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) Conference, mentioning Scrum only with comparison to Waterfall, Spiral, and Iterative approaches as an empirical process. After the following year, when they released their article that was an enriched version of the presentation, Scrum contributed to the spread of still unnamed “Agile” approaches, like triggering the birth of XP(Extreme Programming). In 1999, with the help of Mike Beedle, Martine Devos ve Yonat Sharon, Sutherland, and Schwaber explained how Scrum -even far away from the current version- is processed and its main components. Scrum finally gained maturity and awareness. Hence, in 2001 including the representatives of differentiated approaches from classical methods, 17 software developers signed a shared paper to replace document-oriented, heavyweight software development processes after a “holiday” mood meeting, and “The Agile Manifesto” was published. The general shape of “Agile” was officially announced to be guided all over the World and led to significant changes in the management mindset in the 21st century in this ‘ski and relax’ focused but highly efficient “meeting.” Scrum was already born, but staying and spreading under “Agile” would be in this century. The story went on touching most of our lives, but let the rest be in another article, and we stay with the baby born Scrum right now.

The power of sports: Butterfly effect

William Web Ellis was unaware of how he had affected the next century when he carried the ball with his hands and passed the goal line. How can a sport played by foot be played with hands? But if the purpose is to score and have fun, the way of how is less important. Being invented with a different view, Rugby got ahead, being a kind of sport, for instance, unified segregated South Africa under the leadership of Nelson Mandela with the “One Team, One Country” motto. The reflection of the business world nowadays is adopting Scrum play as the center of management. In brief, anything unnoticeable may open different doors; perhaps we can contribute to this as happened in the birth of Scrum. Who knows?

?

?zgür Bar?? Haz?r, Agile Coach