The first book-length treatment of scrum, written by ken-schwaber and mike-beedle and published in October 2001 — the same year as the agile-manifesto that both had signed at snowbird-meeting-2001. The book codified the Scrum framework for a general audience after years of practice and the prior oopsla-scrum-presentation-1995 academic presentation.
Content and contribution
The book defined what scrum meant as a software development methodology: empirical-process-control as the philosophical foundation (transparency, inspection, adaptation); a specific set of roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team); a set of events including the sprint-planning, daily daily-standup, and sprint-review; and the artifacts of the product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment.
The empirical process control foundation distinguishes Scrum from XP: where extreme-programming provides a rich set of engineering practices (test-driven-development, pair-programming, continuous-integration), Scrum provides a management and organizational framework that is largely agnostic about technical practices. This separation of concerns was consequential — it allowed Scrum to spread across teams without requiring adoption of XP's demanding technical practices.
Historical context
mike-beedle brought a background in chaos theory and complex adaptive systems to the collaboration, which shows in the book's framing of software development as an inherently complex (not merely complicated) problem — one that empirical-process-control handles better than defined processes. This distinction maps directly to the Cynefin framework's complicated/complex distinction, though that connection was made more explicitly later.
The book appeared during the first wave of Agile adoption, when scrum and extreme-programming were competing for attention. The relative simplicity of Scrum's structure — three roles, five events (approximate count varies by version), three artifacts — compared to XP's more numerous and demanding practices contributed to Scrum's eventual dominance.
Relationship to the Scrum Guide
ken-schwaber later co-authored the scrum-guide with jeff-sutherland as the authoritative reference for Scrum. The Guide has been updated multiple times and is now the canonical definition. This 2001 book should be read as the historical codification rather than the current specification.