Scrum emerged in the early 1990s through the work of Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, who formally introduced it at the 1995 OOPSLA conference. Their inspiration came from a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper titled "The New New Product Development Game," which described high-performing teams using rugby-style "scrum" tactics. This is where the methodology got its name.^[1] Extreme Programming (XP), developed by Kent Beck in the late 1990s while working on Chrysler's C3 payroll system, focused on technical excellence.

While Scrum provided structure for organization and collaboration, XP delivered engineering discipline through practices like test-driven development, continuous integration, and pair programming.^[2] Both methodologies responded to the failures of traditional waterfall approaches by embracing iterative development, customer feedback, and adaptive planning. Together, they formed the cornerstone of what would become the Agile movement, ultimately leading to the 2001 Agile Manifesto, which Schwaber, Sutherland, and Beck all helped create.