A rugby term became a job title for managing software teams.
The word scrum comes from rugby, where it describes the formation in which eight players from each team bind together, heads down, and push against each other for possession of the ball. The metaphor entered software engineering in 1986, when Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka published a paper in the Harvard Business Review describing a new approach to product development in which cross-functional teams moved through a project in overlapping phases, like a rugby team advancing the ball.1
In 1995, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber formalized the method into the Scrum framework, which introduced specific roles, rituals, and time-boxed work cycles called sprints.2 One of the roles was the Scrum Master, a person responsible not for managing the team but for protecting it, removing obstacles, facilitating ceremonies, and ensuring that the process itself functioned. The Scrum Master was not a boss. The team was self-organizing. The Scrum Master served the team, not the other way around.
By 2020, an estimated 58 percent of software development teams worldwide reported using Scrum or a Scrum-derived method, according to the annual State of Agile Report.3 The role of Scrum Master had become one of the most common job titles in the technology industry, carrying salaries that in the United States averaged over $100,000 annually. Certifications from the Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org created a credentialing industry around the role.
The term illustrates how the industrial-era assumption that every team needs a manager was not eliminated by the Agile movement but repackaged. The hierarchy did not disappear. It acquired a new name and a new set of rituals borrowed from a contact sport.4