Genesis of Scrum.org and Professional Scrum Developer

Schwaber initially attempted to develop Scrum.org’s programs while part of the Scrum Alliance, an organization that he founded and managed for half a decade. Ultimately, he found that to accomplish his goal of improving Scrum knowledge, training, and implementations, he would need to break away from the vested interests that had come to dominate the Scrum Alliance. This is what he and others have accomplished through Scrum.org.

A letter from Ken Schwaber to Scrum.org trainers and partners

Written March 30, 2010; posted June 15, 2010

Why

“Why did you found Scrum.org? Are you still with the Scrum Alliance?” I’ve been asked these questions countless times since I left the Scrum Alliance and created Scrum.org last fall. This is the story of my journey with Scrum, starting with its creation, moving through the establishment and evolution of the Scrum Alliance, and ending with my work with Scrum.org. This journey has been shaped by two opposing forces: the desire to do the right thing, and the desire to make money. I formed Scrum.org to refocus my efforts on doing the right thing.

Creating Scrum

The story of Scrum’s beginnings is well-known, so I won’t spend much time on it here. Jeff Sutherland and I had been using Scrum for ten years prior to the meeting at Snowbird where we and others signed the Agile Manifesto. This manifesto, along with my first book about Scrum (“Agile Software Development with Scrum”) and the emergence of modern integrated development environments (IDEs), helped Scrum spread like wildfire in the early 2000s.

A few years later, Martin Fowler and I were flying back to Boston from a conference about scaling Agile projects at the University of Calgary. We were dismayed that so many of our customers hadn’t understood what Agile and Scrum were about. Martin and I decided that some type of instruction and even certification would be necessary to remedy the situation. I went on to develop a two-day ScrumMaster course, the first of which was conducted at ObjectMentor in Chicago in 2002. I certified the attendees as just that – attendees – and listed their names on my website, controlchaos.com. I conducted many of these Certified Scrum Master (CSM) training sessions during 2002 and 2003. The course became more refined and experience-based. It began to distinguish between what Scrum is and how Scrum should be used. I considered the class a success because in my consulting work I could see how much better class attendees were able to use Scrum. I received great feedback from course attendees, and as word spread the courses became extremely popular.

Organizing the Scrum Alliance

By 2004, there were 20 people teaching CSM courses, including myself. I had introduced a progression of Scrum certifications, starting at CSM (which required only class attendance) and moving to Certified Scrum Practitioner and then Certified Scrum Trainer (CSP and CST, both of which required rigorous qualifications and formal assessment). Scrum was taking off due to its simplicity and to everyone’s desire to get away from waterfall as quickly as possible. To help Scrum grow, I needed an organization that could serve as a platform for the Scrum community and a coordinating body for Scrum training.To this end, I formed the Scrum Alliance, asking Esther Derby and Mike Cohn to join me in owning and running it. I contributed all the Scrum Trainer license fees and Certification listing fees to the Scrum Alliance, and within a year we made the Scrum Alliance non-profit. The point of doing so was to remove any suspicion that the Scrum Alliance was about money for us. Instead, it was about money for the Scrum community, which was the true owner of the Scrum Alliance. We held more gatherings. We qualified more CSTs, the only people permitted to offer CSM courses. By 2006, we had more than 50 CSTs and 30,000 CSMs. All courses and all certified individuals were listed on our website at ScrumAlliance.org. At the Minneapolis Scrum Gathering in late 2006, we hired a full-time managing director for the Scrum Alliance. We had organized, funded, and staffed a home for the Scrum community, and the managing director now formalized the administration of the organization. Esther and Mike left the Scrum Alliance and I took on the role of Chairman of the Board.

Fighting “Flaccid Scrum”

By early 2009, there were more than 60,000 CSMs. More organizations were using Agile processes than waterfall processes, and of those employing Agile 84% were using Scrum. However, less than 50% of those using Scrum were developing in incremental iterations, which are the heartbeat of Scrum. Martin Fowler wrote in his blog that he was encountering many instances of "Flaccid Scrum." Teams were using Scrum vocabulary but weren’t able to create a potentially shippable increment of functionality within a single Sprint.

I launched three initiatives to remedy these problems:

1. Creating the “Scrum Developer” program. One of the biggest challenges of using Scrum has always been the steep learning curve for the developers on the Scrum team. But because Scrum is a management practice, most of the people who taught Scrum – the CSTs – were not current developers and were ill-qualified to teach engineering practices like test-driven development or emerging architecture. I wanted to create a specific course to address Scrum developers, so I reached out to three organizations skilled in teaching others how roll up their sleeves and build software using Scrum: Accentient, Conchango, and Microsoft. Under the aegis of the Scrum Alliance, we developed a course for Scrum developers targeting the .NET technology stack. Working with Microsoft gave us access to a base of solid trainers and coaches: Microsoft MVPs and Inner Circle Partners. By starting with Microsoft we were also able to begin with a fully integrated technology stack. Once we had launched this course in spring 2010 alongside Visual Studio 2010, we would work with other partners to develop similar courses targeting other technology stacks.
2. Formalizing the Scrum body of knowledge and measuring understanding thereof. As Scrum spread, so did confusion and misunderstanding of Scrum. Jeff Sutherland and I compiled the Scrum body of knowledge (a.k.a. the Scrum Guide) from previous works, and asked the Scrum Alliance’s managing director to create an assessment program to measure understanding of this material. The idea was that people would be able to take the assessment to gauge their understanding of Scrum.
3. Improving the quality and consistency of the training by CSTs. I had discovered that some of the “flaccid Scrum” phenomenon was due to inconsistent training by CSTs. They had different ideas about Scrum fundamentals: They all defined “done” differently, and many couldn’t answer questions about team and development dynamics during the Sprint. I wanted to improve and stabilize the training materials they were using and the training they were delivering and also create more transparency into the results that they were producing. I launched a program to upgrade and improve the consistency of their courseware, to have course attendees formally evaluate their trainers, and to require a formal assessment prior to certification to help students measure their level of understanding.

The Backlash

An organization can either be mission driven or money driven. Not both. When I started the Scrum Alliance, our mission was to improve the profession of software development. That later became “to transform the world of work.” By 2007, I believe that the quest for money had made the mission secondary at Scrum Alliance. I failed to see the effects that my initiatives would have on the money-making of the Scrum Alliance and its members. If I had mapped the money-making activities of the Scrum Alliance to these initiatives, it would have been obvious to me that the community would resist them. In 2008, Scrum Alliance revenues came largely from three sources (see Table 1). Individual CSTs taught an average of 200 students a year. Course fees ranged from $1,000 to $2,000 per student. This meant that the average trainer earned $300,000 per year just from training.

Table 1: 2008 Scrum Alliance Revenues

As you can see, the Scrum Alliance was dependent on the annual licenses from CST and the CSM fees that they brought in. The CSTs were in turn dependent on the revenues from their CSM courses. More specifically:

• The trainers were upset that they wouldn’t be able to teach the CSD course. Many of the trainers resented the fact that the course was being designed to be taught by people skilled in software development rather than people skilled in product management. This failed to protect and/or increase their incomes, which they considered to be the mission of the Scrum Alliance.
  
• Many trainers feared the CSD course would cannibalize CSM course revenues. At the time, many developers were taking the CSM course; if a more relevant course for developers were available, they would likely take it instead.
• Many of the trainers were afraid of transparency. Many trainers opposed efforts to gather and publish data on the effectiveness of their training in the form of student evaluations and student assessments. Each CST was worried that he or she wouldn’t end up ranked in the top three – which of course not everyone could do.
• The recession that was underway at the time exacerbated all of these issues.

My goal of strengthening Scrum and improving the profession was in clear conflict with the community’s goals of maximizing revenues and incomes. This came to a head in August 2009 when the Scrum Alliance board of directors unanimously asked for my resignation. The board members saw my mission as detrimental to their mission of supporting the CST franchise.

Tom Mellor, the new chairman of the board, sent out an email announcing my resignation. After that, the board terminated the programs described above. They cancelled, re-announced, and finally rolled out a basic assessment that failed to provide any meaningful measure of understanding. They terminated the ScrumAlliance’s commitments to our partners, Microsoft and Accentient, in developing courses for Scrum developers. They have since introduced a weak Certified Scrum Developer program that is designed to protect the income of the existing CSTs.

Establishing Scrum.org

When I resigned as chairman of the Scrum Alliance, I gained the freedom to restart an organization that was again mission driven. I was free to pursue my goal of delivering Scrum developer training, among other things. At that point, I sat down and made the following commitments:

• I would create a new organization, Scrum.org, to continue developing and sustaining the Scrum Developer program.
• The program would lead to assessments and certifications based on a body of knowledge.
• I would also redevelop a new, more advanced version of the Scrum courseware. This courseware, called Scrum-In-Depth, would focus on how to use Scrum in advanced circumstances.
• I would publish the Scrum body of knowledge on Scrum.org, and formulate beginner, intermediate, and advanced assessments and certifications based on this body of knowledge.
• I would form a new group of Scrum Trainers who welcomed openness and transparency.

Scrum.org would follow its mission within a framework of checks and balances that I failed to implement at the Scrum Alliance (see Table 2).

Table 2: How Scrum.org Retains Mission Focus

In the past six months, Scrum.org has introduced several new programs that adhere to this mission driven framework. The most important of these is the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) program. PSD training courses teach developers how to use modern software engineering practices to develop an increment of completed, potentially shippable functionality. Developers are taught how to do so within the Scrum framework, working as part of self-organizing cross-functional teams, doing iterative, incremental development.

The PSD program’s focus on instruction merges all of the aspects of how to build an increment. We model real life, the way developers spend their days. This is a completely new program, painstakingly developed over the last year. The program was launched in partnership with Microsoft, Accentient, Zuehlke, Pyxis, Adrena Objects, nTier, and codecentric. The first course in the Professional Scrum Developer program targets .NET developers working in Visual Studio 2010.

How else is Scrum.org fighting “flaccid Scrum”? In addition to the PSD program, Scrum.org has also developed a Scrum body of knowledge and an assessment program to measure understanding of this material. We are also hiring, mentoring, and organizing the best Scrum training in the world. I am confident that these programs, in combination with other efforts, will do much to achieve my goal of improving the profession of software development.

Professional Scrum Developer vs. Certified Scrum Developer

The Scrum Alliance recently announced that it will be introducing a Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) program. This program grants certification to individuals who fulfill distribution requirements by taking courses on Scrum from CSTs and courses on software development from third-party vendors. Many people ask me how the PSD program differs from the CSD program. By contrasting the two programs, I’ll be able to more clearly show why I left the Scrum Alliance and formed Scrum.org (see Table 3).

Table 3: Scrum.org PSD Program And Scrum Alliance CSD Program

As you can see, there are many differences between the two course offerings. In my view, the most important difference is that the PSD course was built from the ground up to prepare developers to work in Scrum teams. The CSD program, in contrast, consists primarily of a $150 bi-annual fee indicating that someone has taken a particular collection of courses. The CSD program doesn’t deliver training; instead, it references training that was already in existence. While the PSD program delivers a coherent course that teaches developers by immersing them in the context of a Scrum team, the CSD program is a patchwork of courses that accomplishes little other than to generate more revenue for CSTs and the Scrum Alliance. When someone tells you that they are a PSD you know exactly how they were trained, what they were trained on, and you can know that they mastered the material. When someone tells you that they are a CSD, you don’t know what that means.

The PSD program is a defined and integrated curriculum with an established quality bar that will be delivered by qualified trainers worldwide. But most importantly it is an effective antidote to the “flaccid Scrum” problem that Martin Fowler first named and that we have all encountered.

The Road Forward

Our mission remains the same today as it was 19 years ago - to help our profession rise to the demands of an increasingly complex world that relies on increasingly complex technologies and products. Advances in materials and techniques can only succeed if we shift to a collaborative, creative approach to build the enabling software.

As we use Scrum, we continue to find new opportunities for professional improvement. As the inspect-and-adaptation mechanism of Scrum uncovers issues, we intend to develop and apply new programs at Scrum.org. We then intend to inspect their effectiveness, adapt to circumstance, and improve whenever necessary. These programs will refine bodies of knowledge, create training and coaching capabilities, and offer assessment and certification of knowledge and skills. To that end, we are aligning communities of people around common goals to encourage ownership, participation, and advancement.

The first program to be created is for our Scrum Developer Trainers, the Professional Scrum Developer program. Training and certifying developers using Scrum is a challenging task. To tackle this challenge we are engaging the best we can find to help us continually improve the program, ensuring its efficacy. The future is bright, and I am excited to see what will be accomplished this year. May the wind always be at your back.

Ken Schwaber