Scrum takes over XP

March 22, 2006 by Artem

Extreme programming and Scrum are probably the most known agile software development methods over there. I myself find Scrum being more attractive and putting fewer requirements on the people communication skills. Have you ever wondered which method is more popular, which one is more talked about and what is the trend? I decided to ask the ubiquitous source of information - the web. I searched for "agile AND scrum" and "agile AND (xp OR extreme programming OR extremeprogramming"). "agile" is included to cut out the rugby's scrum. The search engine syntaxes are a bit different; you can see the concrete queries, by following the result links.

So here are the results:

Engine	XP	Scrum	Scrum/XP
Google Web	1630000	384	4245
Google Scholar	4160	704	5,9
Technorati	6662	1429	4,7
Google Blogsearch	2585	1190	2,2

"General public" awareness of XP is 4000 times higher, than of Scrum. You can confidently state that the majority of people who heard about XP never heard about Scrum. If you look at the research community, it is evident that there is much more research about the XP, but the ratio is just 5,9. The ratio of the active discussion numbers is even less: from 4,7 to 2,2 depending on which engine you trust more, but anyway lower, than the web and scholar ratios.

To me these results look like a proof of a big Scrum potential. It is researched and discussed a way more, than you might have thought.