The founding of the scrum-alliance in 2002, by ken-schwaber, mike-cohn, and esther-derby. The Scrum Alliance became the primary certification and community body for scrum, creating the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) program that would become the most widely held Agile certification in the industry.
Context
A year after snowbird-meeting-2001 and the founding of the agile-alliance, the Scrum community needed an organizational structure to support training, certification, and community building specifically around scrum. The Scrum Alliance was established to fill this role.
The CSM certification
The Scrum Alliance's Certified Scrum Master (CSM) program was the Scrum Alliance's primary institutional innovation. The CSM required attendance at a two-day training course — no examination was required initially — and was issued by Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs) who were themselves certified by the Scrum Alliance.
The CSM became enormously popular, partly because it was achievable with minimal investment (two days of training), partly because "Agile" was increasingly demanded by employers, and partly because the training itself was genuinely valuable for many practitioners. By the mid-2010s, hundreds of thousands of CSMs had been issued.
Subsequent controversy
The CSM's ease and commercial scale became a source of tension. ken-schwaber grew increasingly concerned that the CSM was being issued too easily and that the Scrum Alliance's commercial incentives (training revenue) were compromising the quality of Scrum education. This tension led to schwaber-leaves-scrum-alliance-2009 and the founding of scrum-org with the harder Professional Scrum Master (PSM) certification.
Significance
The Scrum Alliance was the primary institutional vehicle for Scrum's mainstream adoption during the scrum-dominance-and-mainstream era. Love it or critique it, the CSM program was the mechanism by which Scrum knowledge (and Scrum identity) spread through the industry. The tension between certification-as-business and certification-as-quality-assurance that the Scrum Alliance embodies is a microcosm of the agile-industrial-complex problem.