The genesis of this book traces back to the summer of 2008 when Jens Østergaard, Gertrud Bjørnvig, and I were exploring dreams of how we could better share the message of Scrum with the world, while we were together at Stora Nyteboda—Jens' country house in Sweden. Knowing that patterns had already been used to describe organizational practices, we realized that they would also be a good match for the framework nature of Scrum. In May 2010, the first group of eight authors came together at Stora Nyteboda to start mining the patterns that would nurture this effort to collect and catalog expert insights.
We steadily made progress over ten years marked by many moments of fellowship, anticipation, progress, struggle, joy, and occasional frustration. These patterns emerged from the collective hearts and souls of our twenty authors over that time. We all “haveˮ all of them. So this is not so much a compendium of separate ideas from separate authors, but rather the result of nearly a decade of people supporting each other in learning and reflection, and synthesizing and annealing the patterns into a body of hard-won, practical, and authoritative insights. I wanted to take the opportunity in this note to first thank my nineteen friends and colleagues who were the wellspring of the work you hold in your hands (or are reading on your screen).
But the main message I want to convey in this note is to recognize the core editorial team within the author ranks who pulled this book together into a cogent Whole during the last three years of its development. That group meticulously undertook all the thankless work of refining the grammar, of securing permission for the artwork, of making the tough decisions of what’s in and what’s out, and a thousand other details. Christopher Alexander teaches us that beauty in architecture owes to attentiveness to structure down to the granularity of one-sixtieth of an inch as much as it does to the urban-scale patterns. Our editors adeptly traversed this entire range of manuscript detail to bring the book as close as we could to our vision of Wholeness and beauty. So I would like to especially thank Mark den Hollander, Cesário Ramos, and Lachlan Heasman, each of whom invested hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours doing the meticulous, tedious, and sometimes weighty work that aspires to a result that is a piece of literature rather than just a good technical book. Dina Friis joined this editorial effort as she could and also stands out in her thoughtful contributions and her challenges to the rest of us. Together, we fought the good that drives out the perfect—and while a pattern is never perfect, I feel that this team in particular helped move us a great distance along this spectrum. Friends, you have my very deepest and heartfelt appreciation.
Yet, in a broader sense, we all are only the messengers and editors of the great ideas from that broader Scrum community of which you are a part. On behalf of all the authors, I'd like to thank you for reading and using the patterns in this book, and for thereby improving your own world of work, and in turn making the whole world just a little bit better for all of us.
— James O. Coplien, Product Owner, A Scrum Book.