The Evolution of the Scrum Guide— ‘10 to ‘19

The Scrum Guide has changed — are you up to date?

Introduction

In 2010, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland published their first version of the Scrum Guide, as an attempt to define Scrum, and help practitioners understand the rules of the game. However, as Willem-Jan Ageling has recently posted here at Serious Scrum, this was nowhere near the first attempt to articulate the Scrum framework.

The first version of the guide was written between 2008 and 2010. Scrum was being used in industry for decades before 2008, but the guide in 2010 was Schwaber and Sutherland’s first attempt to distill the framework into a short, freely available document, a definition of sorts.

The conclusion, or ‘end note’ to the guide, added in July 2011, offers a hint to what the two authors 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 practices.” (Source: Scrum Guide July 2011)

Even in the foreword to the first edition, companies such as GE Medical and Fidelity…