Jeff Sutherland

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Jeff Sutherland
Jeff Sutherland.JPG
Born (1941-06-20) June 20, 1941 (age 82)
Alma mater United States Military Academy (B.S.)
Stanford University (M.S.)
University of Colorado School of Medicine (PhD)
Occupation Project manager
Known forCreating Scrum method

Jeff Sutherland (born June 20, 1941) is one of the creators of Scrum, a framework for product management. [1] Together with Ken Schwaber, he presented Scrum at OOPSLA'95. Sutherland contributed to the creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Along with Ken Schwaber, he wrote and maintains The Scrum Guide, which contains the official definition of the framework. [1]

Contents

Early career

Sutherland is a graduate of the United States Military Academy. [2] In 1967 he deployed with the United States Air Force to Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base to fly reconnaissance flights in a RF-4C Phantom. [3]

After returning from the Vietnam war, Sutherland earned a master's degree in statistics from Stanford University. He then became a professor of mathematics at the United States Air Force Academy. [3] Sutherland earned a doctorate in biometrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. [4]

Project management career

Jointly 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. [5]

Scrum is a framework for enabling business agility at scale across an entire organization. [3] A meeting which was influenced by the Agile Manifesto. [6] Sutherland is quoted as saying the "systems development process is an unpredictable and complicated process that can only roughly be described as an overall progression". [7]

The scrum process was developed by Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna while at Easel Corporation and influenced by agile software development. The principle was based on a 1986 article by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the Harvard Business Review , [8] and incorporates practices from a draft study published in Dr. Dobb's Journal. [9] It involves 30-day cycles of plan, build and monitor sprints. [10] The name Scrum was chosen in reference to the rugby scrummage, [10] as the system involves "a cross-functional team" who "huddle together to create a prioritized list". [11] Scrum has been used by several major corporations. [12] Sutherland has claimed that distributed teams coached to use the system can make large productivity increases against the industry average. [13]

Scrum Framework

Scrum involves a cross-functional team creating a list to work on. [11] The team consists of three specific roles, the Product Owner, the Developers and the Scrum Master. [12] The team then works through three phases: a pre-sprint planning, the sprint and then a post-sprint meeting. [14] The group has daily meetings and keeps a Product Backlog. [15] In contributing to the book The Secrets of Happy Families, Sutherland modified the Agile approach to family interactions. [16]

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. [17] 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". [18] Sutherland has also been quoted as saying that Scrum should run with software architecture. [9]

Sutherland is the founder and principal consultant at Scrum, Inc in Boston, Massachusetts, currently led by his son, JJ Sutherland as the CEO. [19] Additionally, he was appointed a senior advisor to OpenView Venture Partners 2007 for a short period in that year. [20]

Bibliography

Books

Selected articles

Related Research Articles

In software development, agile practices include requirements, discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/end user(s). Popularized in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development, these values and principles were derived from, and underpin, a broad range of software development frameworks, including Scrum and Kanban.

James O. Coplien, also known as Cope, is a writer, lecturer, and researcher in the field of computer science. He held the 2003–4 Vloeberghs Leerstoel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and has been a visiting professor at University of Manchester.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process level improvement training and appraisal program. Administered by the CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of ISACA, it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It is required by many U.S. Government contracts, especially in software development. CMU claims CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, division, or an entire organization. CMMI defines the following maturity levels for processes: Initial, Managed, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, and Optimizing. Version 2.0 was published in 2018. CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by CMU.

In agile principles, timeboxing allocates a maximum unit of time to an activity, called a timebox, within which a planned activity takes place. It is used by agile principles-based project management approaches and for personal time management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Schwaber</span> American computer scientist

Ken Schwaber is a software developer, product manager and industry consultant. He worked with Jeff Sutherland to formulate the initial versions of the Scrum framework and to present Scrum as a formal process at OOPSLA'95. Schwaber and Sutherland are two of the 17 initial signatories of the Agile Manifesto. They are co-authors of the Scrum Guide. Schwaber runs Scrum.org, which provides Scrum resources, training, assessments, and certifications for Scrum Masters, Scrum Developers, Scrum Product Owners, and organizations using Scrum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scrum (software development)</span> Management framework

Scrum is an agile team collaboration framework commonly used in software development and other industries.

Strategic planning software is a category of software that covers a wide range of strategic topics, methodologies, modeling and reporting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Chicken and the Pig</span> Business fable about levels of commitment

The business fable of The Chicken and the Pig is about commitment to a project or cause. When producing a dish made of eggs with ham or bacon, the pig provides the ham or bacon which requires his or her sacrifice and the chicken provides the eggs which are not difficult to produce. Thus the pig is really committed to that dish, while the chicken is only involved, yet both are needed to produce the dish.

The bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus". It is also known as the bus problem, truck factor, or bus/truck number.

Organizational patterns are inspired in large part by the principles of the software pattern community, that in turn takes it cues from Christopher Alexander's work on patterns of the built world. Organizational patterns also have roots in Kroeber's classic anthropological texts on the patterns that underlie culture and society. They in turn have provided inspiration for the Agile software development movement, and for the creation of parts of Scrum and of Extreme Programming in particular.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ikujiro Nonaka</span>

Ikujiro Nonaka is a Japanese organizational theorist and Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of the Hitotsubashi University, best known for his study of knowledge management.

Linda Rising is an American author, lecturer, independent consultant. Rising is credited as having played a major role in having "moved the pattern approach from design into corporate change." She also contributed to the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, edited by Kevlin Henney and published by O´Reilly in 2009 (ISBN 059652269X).

Specification by example (SBE) is a collaborative approach to defining requirements and business-oriented functional tests for software products based on capturing and illustrating requirements using realistic examples instead of abstract statements. It is applied in the context of agile software development methods, in particular behavior-driven development. This approach is particularly successful for managing requirements and functional tests on large-scale projects of significant domain and organisational complexity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kanban board</span> Main tool used to implement the kanban project management methodology

A kanban board is one of the tools that can be used to implement kanban to manage work at a personal or organizational level.

Disciplined agile delivery (DAD) is the software development portion of the Disciplined Agile Toolkit. DAD enables teams to make simplified process decisions around incremental and iterative solution delivery. DAD builds on the many practices espoused by advocates of agile software development, including scrum, agile modeling, lean software development, and others.

eXtreme Manufacturing (XM) is an iterative and incremental framework for manufacturing improvement and new product development that was inspired by the software development methodology Scrum and the systematic waste-elimination (lean) production scheduling system Kanban(かんばん ).

The scaled agile framework (SAFe) is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices. Along with disciplined agile delivery (DAD) and S@S (Scrum@Scale), SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the problems encountered when scaling beyond a single team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hirotaka Takeuchi</span> Japanese business academic

Hirotaka Takeuchi is a professor of management practice in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. He co-authored The New New Product Development Game which influenced the development of the Scrum framework.

Agile learning generally refers to the transfer of agile methods of project work, especially Scrum, to learning processes. Likewise, agile learning proceeds in incremental steps and through an Iterative design which alternates between phases of learning and doing. The tutors rather have the role of a learning attendant or supporter. In a narrower sense, it is intended to allow competence-oriented, media-based learning in the work process within companies. In addition, the term can take several other meanings and is also often used within e-learning and online environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Beedle</span> American software engineer

Mike (Miguel) Beedle was an American theoretical physicist turned software engineer who was a co-author of the Agile Manifesto.

References

  1. 1 2 Sutherland, Jeff; Schwaber, Ken. "The Scrum Guide". Scrum Guides. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  2. "West Point Association of Graduates". www.westpointaog.org. Retrieved 2020-08-26.[ permanent dead link ]
  3. 1 2 3 Sutherland, Jeff; Sutherland, J. J. (2014). Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Crown Publishing Group. ISBN   9780385346467.
  4. Sutherland, Jeffrey V. (1980). The Multihit Model of Carcinogenesis and Its Application to Human Colon Cancer Incidence Data (PhD Thesis). Department of Biometrics, University of Colorado.
  5. Schwaber, Ken (2009). Agile Project Management with Scrum. O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN   9780735637900.
  6. 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.
  7. Zelkowitz, Marvin (2008). "History of Computers, Electronic Commerce". Advances in Computers: Emerging Technologies. 73: 32. ISBN   9780080880310.
  8. Sims, Peter (2011). Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries. Random House. p. 85. ISBN   9781409038030.
  9. 1 2 Coplien, James O. (2011). Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   9780470970133.
  10. 1 2 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.
  11. 1 2 McQuarrie, Gray (2010). Change Your Dam Thinking. Bound Publishing. p. 133. ISBN   9780986723308.
  12. 1 2 Larman, Craig (2008). Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum. Pearson Education. ISBN   9780321617149.
  13. Woodward, Elizabeth (2010). A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum. Pearson Education. ISBN   9780137061365.
  14. Rico, David F. (2007). Effects of Agile Methods on Website Quality for Electronic Commerce. University of Maryland University College. ISBN   9780549764946.
  15. Kroll, Per (2006). Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP. Pearson Education. ISBN   9780132702485.
  16. Parrish, Shane (9 December 2013). "The secrets of happy families". The Week. Retrieved 18 December 2013.
  17. Viscardi, Stacia (2013). The Professional ScrumMaster's Handbook. Packt Publishing Ltd. ISBN   9781849688031.
  18. Alan Shalloway; Guy Beaver; James R. Trott (2009). Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility. Pearson Education. ISBN   9780321647993.
  19. "About Us". Scrum Inc. Retrieved 2020-06-22.
  20. "Scrum Creator Sutherland Joins OpenView | OpenView Venture Partners". OpenView. 2007-08-09. Retrieved 2018-03-11.