The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Operational decision · 1993–1995
Scrum's time-boxed cycles: the 1993 team method that made Agile workable
Jeff Sutherland's 1993 Easel team ran software in short self-organizing cycles; OOPSLA '95 made Scrum public.
Jeff Sutherland · Ken Schwaber · John Scumniotales · Jeff McKenna
What it had to solve
In 1993 Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna built the first Scrum team at the Easel Corporation, adapting Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka's rugby-inspired product-development ideas from their 1986 Harvard Business Review article 'The New New Product Development Game'. Two years later Sutherland worked with Ken Schwaber to formalize the approach and present it publicly.
How it works
Before Scrum, software teams commonly worked from large up-front plans that assumed requirements would stay fixed until delivery. Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna challenged that assumption in 1993 at the Easel Corporation, borrowing from a 1986 Harvard Business Review article by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, which described rugby-like, self-organized product development used by companies such as Honda, Canon and Fuji-Xerox.
The resulting framework ran development in short, fixed cycles with a self-organizing team that could inspect results and adapt instead of following a frozen plan. Ken Schwaber presented the approach publicly in 'The Scrum development process' at the OOPSLA conference in Austin, Texas, in 1995, formalizing Scrum with Sutherland; around the same time Kent Beck began developing Extreme Programming with input from both, so the two methods complemented each other.
Scrum grew into one of the most widely adopted Agile frameworks, used far beyond software. The Scrum Guide, first published in 2010 by Schwaber and Sutherland, defined the roles, events and artifacts in one concise reference, and the co-creators' separate training organizations built a global certification ecosystem around it.
Why it lands
- The team borrowed from documented product-development practice instead of inventing blindly, so the approach already carried evidence from Honda, Canon and others.
- Short fixed cycles forced teams to deliver usable results early, when feedback could still change the direction cheaply.
- A self-organizing team removed the bottleneck of waiting for managers to schedule every step of the work.
- Public presentation at OOPSLA gave Scrum a name and a form others could adopt, test and critique.
What it did
Scrum went from one team at Easel to one of the most widely adopted Agile frameworks, used well beyond software engineering. Sutherland and Schwaber helped write the Agile Manifesto in 2001, then each founded training organizations — the Scrum Alliance in 2002 and Scrum.org in 2009 — so the method developed its own certification industry as it spread.
What you can take
Time-box the work, keep the team self-organizing and inspect the result often: small adjustable steps beat one giant plan whenever the future refuses to hold still.
Since then
After the 1995 OOPSLA paper, Scrum was folded into the wider Agile movement: Sutherland and Schwaber were among the 17 authors of the 2001 Agile Manifesto, and the two co-creators split the teaching business — the Scrum Alliance was founded in 2002 and Scrum.org in 2009 — before publishing the first Scrum Guide together in 2010. The guide has been revised five times since, while Scrum has been adopted across industries that have nothing to do with software, from marketing to hardware development.
Sources
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card