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.

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.

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.

Scrum is a development process for software. A meeting which was strongly influenced by the founders of Scrum created the Agile Manifesto. 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".

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, and incorporates practices from a draft study published in Dr. Dobb's Journal. It involves 30-day cycles of plan, build and monitor sprints. The name Scrum was chosen in reference to the rugby scrummage, as the system involves "a cross-functional team" who "huddle together to create a prioritized list". Scrum has been used by several major corporations. Sutherland has claimed that distributed teams coached to use the system can make large productivity increases against the industry average.

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