They first applied this method at Easel Corporation in 1993. They called their new method Scrum, after the rugby term that describes how teams form a circle and go for the ball to get it back into play again. Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, and Mike Beedle took the ideas from this paper, including the metaphor, and applied it to their field of software development.

Scrum is based on a 1986 paper written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka for the Harvard Business Review titled “The New New Product Development Game.” In this paper, the authors used the sport of rugby as a metaphor to describe the benefits of self-organizing teams in innovative product development and delivery. Simply put, Scrum is an agile method of iterative and incremental product delivery that uses frequent feedback and collaborative decision making. They are all agile, they are all good, and many can be used in combination. A helpful metaphor would be to think of Agile as being ice cream, while Scrum, XP, Crystal, etc., are all simply different flavors, like chocolate, strawberry, vanilla.

All of these methods adhere to the Agile Manifesto and its associated principles. Other methods include Extreme Programming (XP), Crystal, Feature Driven Development, DSDM Atern, and so on. Scrum is simply one of many agile approaches to product development. While Scrum is indeed agile, it is not the sole method of implementing agile principles. There is a common misconception that Agile is Scrum. We should first be clear on what Scrum is not. This paper provides an overview of Scrum and its use in project management. The involvement of the business throughout the project is critical as Scrum relies heavily on the collaboration between the team and the customer or customer representative to create the right product in a lean fashion. This is done using time boxes, collaborative ceremonies, a prioritized product backlog, and frequent feedback cycles. Traditional project management methods fix requirements in an effort to control time and cost Scrum on the other hand, fixes time and cost in an effort to control requirements. Often referred to as “an agile project management framework,” its focus is on the use of an empirical process that allows teams to respond rapidly, efficiently, and effectively to change. Scrum is one of the agile methodologies designed to guide teams in the iterative and incremental delivery of a product.

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