Scrum as Organizational Patterns

From the summit at Stora Nyteboda, Sweden, 21 June 2008

Organizational Patterns emerged as an organizational modeling technique during the 1990s at Bell Laboratories under the direction of Jim Coplien, Neil Harrison and Brendan Cain. This broad-based work would eventually embrace patterns from a broad collection of contributing authors including Brian Foote, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Steve Berczuk, and others. In about the same time frame, Jeff Sutherland was doing research and empirical work to build a development framework that we call Scrum today. Small bits of the original Bell Labs research trickled into the Scrum effort, including the notion of daily stand-up meetings that we call Scrums today. In the late 1990s, Michael Beedle got together with some co-authors that included Scrum's founders, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, to write up the first Scrum pattern language. Jim Coplien and Jeff Sutherland would eventually meet in 2005, and in 2007 Cope introduced Jeff to the organizational patterns. Jeff became interested in them — particularly for what they said about the value of communication in teams — and wrote about it in his 'blog.

In June 2008, a group assembled at Stora Nyteboda in Sweden to broadly revisit the patterns that describe Scrum. The group included Jeff Sutherland, Jim Coplien, Jens Østergaard, Gertrud Bjørnvig, and Dina Friis (see us below). Anne Odgaard Aarøe and Bo Frese Rasmussen supplemented the group's discussion. This web site was the result. Of course, in the Agile spirit, this site continues to grow and evolve. See:

• The work in progress on the Scrum Patterns Summary page;

• An early online draft of the Organizational Patterns book;

• Software Scrum Patterns, the patterns without which one cannot run a successful project under the Scrum framework, and

• First-Level Scrum Patterns, the original patterns from Michael and co-authors