I remember it was approximately 2008-2009 when I read a blog post, then article/paper about this idea. At the time Jeff Sutherland mentioned it, but the leading voice behind the idea was Scott Downey who worked at MySpace at the time.
Part of the reason I was intrigued was that agile coaches were really struggling to find their hand or balance when it came to “spinning up” Scrum teams at this time. Quite often the approaches were really soft and non-prescriptive. The coaches often hinted at a combination of practices, perhaps giving the team a link to a basic reference (the Scrum Guide), and then the teams were left to fend for themselves.
Often the results were horrible. The teams picked the practices they were comfortable with and left behind the rest. Often they picked such a trivial combination, that the results were hardly agile and hardly effective. This was also the time when Ken Schwaber coined the term Scrum Butt and the Nokia Test was being used as a litmus test to see if you were really doing Scrum or not.
