In June 2008, IT professionals from Georgia Institute of Technology, Notre Dame and Wake Forest University gathered together to discuss opportunities for improving their software development, desiring more involvement and collaboration with their campus community, while increasing morale and productivity on their teams. As a result of these conversations, these three universities began learning more about Scrum and Agile software development processes.

As these institutions learned more about the Scrum methodology, they continued to reach out to one another as is true to the culture of higher education. In August 2008, Cornell University had joined the group and the four schools decided to form a collaborative organization and affectionately called their group “ScrumU.”

ScrumU founding members keep in regular contact through a variety of methods and share lessons learned from implementing Scrum in a higher education setting. Each of these institutions has found marked improvements in productivity, morale and customer service from the implementation of Scrum. These successes have been especially beneficial given the current economic conditions.

The founding members of the group have continued to profess the benefits of Scrum when gathered among other institutions, gaining interest from many other institutions who are implementing Scrum already and also schools that had not heard of Scrum and are interested in learning more.