Accidental Adoption: The Story of Scrum at Amazon.com

By late 2004, Scrum had been chosen independently as a development process by several teams at Amazon.com. From then until 2009, Scrum spread to a large portion of the software development teams at Amazon. This widespread adoption occurred in part due to the actions of a single individual and in part due to the natural match between Scrumpsilas characteristics and the culture prevalent at Amazon.com. Widespread use of small, independent teams and a general empowerment at the team level made Scrum a smaller step to take for development teams at Amazon than it would be at many companies of equal or greater size. The success of Scrum at Amazon shows how important the prevailing culture of the company can be in terms of supporting an Agile transformation. These lessons are relevant to Scrum transformations being undertaken at many companies today.