Just some historical notes since no one brought them up:
“Scrum”, as a trademark’d process / course / business…
…grew out of “agile”, a concept / manifesto…
…which grew out of “extreme programming”, a book by Kent Beck.
Kent Beck was an programmer, leading a team of consultants, that recognized that the formal methods of producing software at the time (think “waterfall”) - no longer made sense, because the assumptions about the discipline had changed. Our practice as programmers used to be: write on coding sheets, have someone card punch, submit deck to run, retrieve printout an hour later… (I learned to code in this era!) This meant that debugging and code change was costly and re-architecting was impossibly expensive…
But this was no longer true: Kent was an early Smalltalk programmer - and Smalltalk pioneered the concept of development environment (inventing most of GUI as we know it today along the way!) And so, Kent and his team went about creating a process that took advantage of the speed those development environments offered. Coupling it with strong automated testing, they found a process that was the opposite of process-laden methodologies – and was agile.
The approach they developed, and outlined in extreme programming was developed by and for engineers, to make them faster at delivering just the right code without bugs. They did it because it worked for them. In the book they stress that every group should take and use what they need from their work, and adapt it as needed to work for them. I’d say “certified Scrum-master” is pretty antithetical to what they were sharing.
I really recommend the book extereme programming as well as the few other volumes in the series. They are very short, and to the point. I think afternoon or two reading them is worth more than any Scrum™️ course I’ve ever seen.
