What is Scrum?

Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or

managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the
end of every iteration. It's attributes are:

Scrum is an agile process to manage and control development work.

Scrum is a wrapper for existing engineering practices.
Scrum is a team-based approach to iteratively, incrementally develop
systems and products when requirements are rapidly changing
Scrum is a process that controls the chaos of conflicting interests and
needs.
Scrum is a way to improve communications and maximize co-operation.
Scrum is a way to detect and cause the removal of anything that gets in
the way of developing and delivering products.
Scrum is a way to maximize productivity.
Scrum is scalable from single projects to entire organizations. Scrum has
controlled and organized development and implementation for multiple
interrelated products and projects with over a thousand developers and
implementers.
Scrum is a way for everyone to feel good about their job, their
contributions, and that they have done the very best they possibly could.

Scrum naturally focuses an entire organization on building successful products.

Without major changes -often within thirty days - teams are building useful,

demonstrable product functionality. Scrum can be implemented at the beginning

of a project or in the middle of a project or product development effort that is in
trouble.
Scrum is a set of interrelated practices and rules that optimize the development
environment, reduce organizational overhead, and closely synchronize market
requirements with iterative prototyes. Based in modern process control theory,
Scrum causes the best possible software to be constructed given the available
resources, acceptable quality, and required release dates. Useful product
functionality is delivered every thirty days as requirements, architecture, and
design emerge, even when using unstable technologies.
Over fifty organizations have successfully used Scrum in thousands of projects to
manage and control work, always with significant productivity improvements.
Scrum wraps an organization's existing engineering practices; they are improved
as necessary while product increments are delivered to the user or marketplace.
As heard about Scrum, "oh, that's just my idea X by another name". Except,
Scrum is spelled out as values, practices, and rules in a development framework
that can be quickly implemented and repeated.
Scrum has been used to produce financial products, Internet products, and
medical products by ADM. In every instance, the organization was logjammed,
unable to produce shippable products for such a long period of time that
engineers, management, and investors were deeply concerned. Scrum broke the
logjam and began incremental product delivery, often with the first shippable
product occuring with the same quarter.
Scrum as applied to product development was first referred to in "The New New
Product Development Game" (Harvard Business Review 86116:137-146, 1986)
and later elaborated in "The Knowledge Creating Company" both by Ikujiro
Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (Oxford University Press, 1995). Based on their
ideas and research in process theory performed in collaboration with DuPont
Advanced Research Facility, Scrum was first formulated and presented to the
Object Management Group in 1995. The Scrum process is fully described in a
recent book from Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, Agile Software Development
with Scrum (Prentice Hall, 2001). An excerpt of that book can be read here.