A look on the ScrumAlliance list of Certified ScrumMasters shows that they have 618 pages each containing 50 names of ScrumMaster. This means more than 30,000 CSMs as of Novembre, 3rd, 2008.
According to an interview of Jeff Sutherland, for every CSM, there are 10 Scrum teams that have not had training. That is, 300,000 Scrum teams.
Finally, Scrum defines that a team is made of 7 people, give or take 2. Taking the conservative value of 5, this means that we have 1,500,000 people doing Scrum.
One and a half million?! Is it really possible? That said, even taking more conservative numbers, there is no doubt that many people are using (trying to use?) Scrum. The annual Agile Survey showed that more than 60% of agile projects are using Scrum, or Scrum combined with XP.
To be honest, this is probably off the mark but maybe not by an order of magnitude. Some estimates put the number of developers worldwide to something between 8 to 13 millions. I’d be surprised that even 5% of developers worldwide are using Scrum (400,000 to 650,000 individuals), but the 1,500,000 figure contains all people in a scrum team, including some that probably do not qualify as developers, such as business analysts, testers, graphical designers, etc. So it could work.
At least it would explain why many people now start to think that Scrum Is Evil.
