Jeff Sutherland
Dr. Jeff Sutherland is one of the inventors of the Scrum software development process. Together with Ken Schwaber, he created Scrum as a formal process at OOPSLA'95. Jeff helped to write the Agile Manifesto in 2001. He is the writer of The Scrum Guide.
Military career
Sutherland is a Graduate of the United States Military Academy, a Top Gun of his USAF RF-4C Aircraft Commander class. He flew more than one hundred missions over North Vietnam. After 11 years in the military he became a doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Here he got involved in data collection and IT systems development.
IT career
NewsPage
In conjunction with Yosi Amram, Sutherland developed NewsPage at Individual.com, one of the first publishers of news on the internet. The news engine used a lexical parsing system.[1]
Scrum development
Scrum is a development process for software. It has been suggested that the development of the system was influenced by a meeting, which Sutherland attended, that also led to the creation of the Agile Manifesto.[2] Sutherland is quoted as saying the "systems development process is an unpredictable and complicated process that can only roughly be described as an overall progress".[3]
The agile approach was developed by Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna while at Easel Corporation. The principle was based on a 1986 article by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the Harvard Business Review,[4] and incorporates practices from a draft study published in Dr. Dobb's Journal.[5] It involves 30-day cycles of plan, build and monitor sprints.[6] The name Scrum was chosen in reference to the rugby scrummage,[6] as the system involves "a cross-functional team" who "huddle together to create a prioritized list".[7] Scrum has been used by several major corporations.[8] Sutherland has claimed that distributed teams coached to use the system can make large productivity increases against the industry average.[9]
Scrum principle
Scrum involves a cross-functional team creating a list to work on.[7] The team consists of three roles, the Product Owner, the Team and the Scrummaster, who each have specific tasks.[8] The team then work through three phases - pre-sprint planning, the sprint and then a post-sprint meeting.[10] The group has daily meetings and keeps a Product Backlog.[11] In contributing to the book The Secrets of Happy Families, Sutherland modified the Agile approach to family interactions.[12]
Sutherland has been quoted as saying the three distinguishing factors between Scrum teams and normal teams are self-management, continuity of team membership, and dedication to a single project.[13] Clarification of user needs is an essential component. Sutherland said no coding should occur while user needs were in doubt, and is quoted as saying "It is better for the developers to be surfing than writing code that won't be needed".[14] Sutherland has also been quoted as saying that Scrum should run with software architecture.[5]
Presentations
In 1995, Sutherland and Schwaber jointly presented a paper describing the Scrum methodology at the Business Object Design and Implementation Workshop held as part of Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications '95 (OOPSLA '95) in Austin, Texas, its first public presentation.
Criticisms
In the book Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, it was noted that the Scrum system as originally developed by Sutherland, had testing and engineering components which were removed to make the system easier. This decision was criticized, as "without them the quality of your code will degrade", and future change becomes more difficult.[14]
Current
He is currently a Chief executive officer of Scrum, Inc in Boston, Massachusetts and Senior Advisor to OpenView Venture Partners.
Publications
- The Scrum Guide™
- Schwaber, Ken; Sutherland, Jeff (2012). Software in 30 Days: How Agile Managers Beat the Odds, Delight Their Customers, And Leave Competitors In the Dust. Wiley. ISBN 978-1118206669.
- Sutherland, Jeff (2011). The Power of Scrum. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 978-1463578060.
- Agile Development: Lessons learned from the first Scrum
- Business object design and implementation: OOPSLA '95 workshop proceedings
- Integrating Java, Objects, Databases, and the Web - OOIS '96 International Conference Paper.
- Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development Teams - System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
- Enterprise application integration and complex adaptive systems - Communications of the ACM, Volume 45 Issue 10, October 2002, Pages 59–64.
- Business objects in corporate information systems - ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 27 Issue 2, June 1995, Pages 274-276.
- Scrum and CMMI Level 5: The Magic Potion for Code Warriors - Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
- Agile can scale: Inventing and reinventing scrum in five companies - Cutter IT Journal, 2001.
- Future of scrum: parallel pipelining of sprints in complex projects - Agile Development Conference 2005.
- The Hybrid Object-Relational Architecture (HORA): an integration of object-oriented and relational technology - SAC '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/SIGAPP symposium on Applied computing: states of the art and practice, Pages 326-333.
References
- ↑ Schwaber, Ken (2009). Agile Project Management with Scrum. O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 9780735637900.
- ↑ Pham, Andrew Thu (2012). Business-Driven IT-Wide Agile (Scrum) and Kanban (Lean) Implementation: An Action Guide for Business and IT Leaders. CRC Press. ISBN 9781466578562.
- ↑ Zelkowitz, Marvin (2008). "History of Computers, Electronic Commerce". Advances in Computers: Emerging Technologies 73: 32.
- ↑ Sims, Peter (2011). Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries. Random House. p. 85. ISBN 9781409038030.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Coplien, James O. (2011). Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9780470970133.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Armour, Phillip G. (2004). The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software. CRC Press. p. 112. ISBN 9780203505649.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 McQuarrie, Gray (2010). Change Your Dam Thinking. Bound Publishing. p. 133. ISBN 9780986723308.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Larman, Craig (2008). Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum. Pearson Education. ISBN 9780321617149.
- ↑ Woodward, Elizabeth (2010). A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum. Pearson Education. ISBN 9780137061365.
- ↑ Rico, David F. (2007). Effects of Agile Methods on Website Quality for Electronic Commerce. ProQuest. ISBN 9780549764946.
- ↑ Kroll, Per (2006). Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP. Pearson Education. ISBN 9780132702485.
- ↑ Parrish, Shane (9 December 2013). "The secrets of happy families". The Week. Retrieved 18 December 2013.
- ↑ Viscardi, Stacia (2013). The Professional ScrumMaster’s Handbook. Packt Publishing Ltd. ISBN 9781849688031.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Shalloway, Allan (2009). Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility. Pearson Education. ISBN 9780321647993.