In the Previous Article we covered the basics of the Scrum Methodology. In this article we are going to cover the History of Scrum…
The Origins!!
In the early-mid 80’s, two people named Hirotaka Takeuchi
and Ikujiro Nonaka wanted a better strategy for building products. They defined
a flexible and all-inclusive strategy where the development team works as a
coordinated unit to reach the common goal. They described this innovative
approach as the “Rugby Approach”.
So, what is the Rugby Approach?
Have you ever watched a game of Rugby? The whole team has
one goal – to move the ball towards the end-line as a collective unit. They
keep passing the ball back-n-forth until they actually reach the end line.
Takeuchi and Nonaka felt that product development must be
like a Rugby game where the team works as a collective unit instead of the
traditional approach which can be compared to a “Relay Race”.
The Birth of Scrum…
Two Gentlemen - Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland can be
considered the founding fathers of the modern day Scrum Methodology. In the
year 1995, they both elaborated on the Scrum Concept and its applicability to
software development and presented the same at the Object Oriented Programming,
Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) conference the same year in
Austin, Texas.
Since that point on, many experts and scrum practitioners
have continued to refine the Scrum Concept and Methodology.
Why Scrum is Better
If you are an experienced Project Manager who is used to
managing projects the traditional PM way, you may be wondering is Scrum Better?
Are you?
I cant really say Scrum is the Best Project Management
Methodology because not all projects are the same. If you have concrete
requirements which are baselined and would not change over the duration of a
project, the traditional plan & build approach will work just fine. But, if
you are building something new which the business has never seen, using the
Scrum Approach would be much better
because at the end of each Sprint, the customer is going to get a
deliverable. Based on the csutomers feedback we can improve the product during
the subsequent sprint cycles.
Lets say, you are building a new product over a period of 1
year and during the User-Acceptance Testing Phase (UAT) the customer realizes
this isn’t what he wanted. One year worth of development, cost and everything
else is down the drain. Instead, if you had a delivery that happened at the end
of the 1st month, the customer would’ve passed on his feedback
immediately and we could’ve done course correction. Isn’t that a Benefit?
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