This form of collaboration inspired the Scrum method in business. Indeed, in 1986, two Japanese business experts introduced the term in the context of product development. Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka published the article, "The New New Product Development Game" (the double “New” is indeed part of the title) in the Harvard Business Review. Their research showed that outstanding performance is achieved when teams are small and self-organising units of people and when such teams are fed with (challenging) objectives, not with executable tasks. Teams can only achieve greatness when given room to devise their own tactics to best head towards shared objectives.

The applicability of those concepts was subsequently extended to the software development industry by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland who introduced their own adaptation of Scrum, during the object-oriented conference OOPSLA in 1995, to counter the established waterfall style project management processes.

They have been collaborating since that time to introduce ever greater clarity and maturity to the Scrum approach, and in 2010, they published their first version of the Scrum Guide, as an attempt to help practitioners understand the rules of the game. In July 2011, the two authors added an ‘end note’ to the guide, offering a hint to what they are really striving for:

“Scrum is free and offered in this guide. Scrum’s roles, artifacts, events, and rules are immutable and although implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum. Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practises.” (Source: Scrum Guide July 2011)

Ever since its first publication in 1995 up to now, Scrum has been adopted by a vast amount of software development companies around the world. It is the most applied framework for agile software development. The framework, however, has also been successfully applied in other domains, e.g. manufacturing, operations, education, marketing, finance, etc.