Jeff Sutherland

Future of scrum: parallel pipelining of sprints in complex projects

The scrum agile development process was invented to rapidly drive new product to market. Here, one of the inventors of scrum goes back to scrum basics, throws out preconceived notions, and designs advanced scrum using multiple overlapping sprints within the same scrum teams. This methodology delivers increasing application functionality to market at a pace that overwhelms competitors using a MetaScrum for release planning, variable length sprints, overlapping sprints for a single team, pre-staging product backlog, daily scrum of scrums meetings, and automation and integration of product backlog and sprint backlog with real-time reporting. Administrative overhead for dozens of enterprise product releases a year is less than 60 seconds a day per developer and less than 10 minutes a day for a ScrumMaster. While advanced scrum is not for the uninitiated, the future of scrum is still scrum, just faster, better, and cooler.

Fully Distributed Scrum: The Secret Sauce for Hyperproductive Offshored Development Teams

Scrum was designed to achieve a hyperproductive state where productivity increases 5-10 times over industry averages and many collocated teams have achieved this effect. The question for this paper is whether distributed, offshore teams can consistently achieve the hyperproductive state. In particular, can a team establish a localized velocity and then maintain or increase that velocity when distributing teams across continents. Since 2006, Xebia started projects with half Dutch and half Indian team members. After establishing localized hyperproductivity, they move the Indian members of the team to India and show increasing velocity with fully distributed teams. After running XP engineering practices inside many distributed Scrum projects, Xebia has systematically productized a model very similar to the SirsiDynix model (J. Sutherland, 2006) for high performance, distributed, offshore teams with outstanding quality.

Scrum and CMMI Going from Good to Great

Projects combining agile methods with CMMI combine adaptability with predictability to better serve large customer needs. The introduction of Scrum at Systematic, a CMMI Level 5 company, doubled productivity and cut defects by 40% compared to waterfall projects in 2006 by focusing on early testing and time to fix builds. Systematic institutionalized Scrum across all projects and used data driven tools like story process efficiency to surface Product Backlog impediments. This allowed them to systematically develop a strategy for a second doubling in productivity. Two teams have achieved a sustainable quadrupling of productivity compared to waterfall projects. We discuss here the strategy to bring the entire company to that level. Our experiences shows that Scrum and CMMI together bring a more powerful combination of adaptability and predictability than either one alone and suggest how other companies can combine them to achieve Toyota level performance – 4 times the productivity and 12 times the quality of waterfall teams.

Fully Distributed Scrum: Linear Scalability of Production between San Francisco and India

The Scrum software development framework was designed for the hyperproductive state where productivity increases by 5-10 times over waterfall teams and many co-located teams have achieved this effect. In 2006, Xebia (The Netherlands) started localized projects with half Dutch and half Indian team members. After establishing a localized velocity of five times their waterfall competitors on the same project, they moved the Indian members of the team to India and showed stable velocity with fully distributed teams. The ability to achieve hyperproductivity with distributed, outsourced teams was shown to be a repeatable process and a fully distributed model is now the recommended standard when organizations have disciplined Scrum teams with full implementation of XP engineering practices inside the Scrum. Previous studies used overlapping time zones to ease communication and create a single distributed team. The goal of this report is to go one step further and show the same results with team members separated by the 12.5 hour time difference between India and San Francisco. If Scrum works without overlapping time zones then applying it to the mainstream offshoring practice in North America will be possible. In 2008, Xebia India started engagements with partners like TBD.com, a social networking site in San Francisco. TBD has an existing core team of developers doing Scrum with an established local velocity. Adding Xebia India developers to the San Francisco team with a Fully Distributed Scrum model achieved linear scalability with a globally distributed outsourced team.

Scrum and CMMI Level 5: The Magic Potion for Code Warriors

Projects combining agile methods with CMMI are more successful in producing higher quality software that more effectively meets customer needs at a faster pace. Systematic software engineering works at CMMI level 5 and uses lean software development as a driver for optimizing software processes. Early pilot projects showed productivity on Scrum teams almost twice that of traditional teams. Other projects using a story-based test-driven approach to software development reduced defects in final test by 40%. We assert that Scrum and CMMI together bring a more powerful combination of adaptability and predictability than either one alone and suggest how other companies can combine them.

Scrum Metrics for Hyperproductive Teams: How They Fly like Fighter Aircraft

Scrum Teams use lightweight tools like Story Points, the Burn down chart, and Team Velocity. While essential, these tools alone provide insufficient information to maintain a high energy state that yields Hyper productivity. More data is required, but data collection itself can slow Teams. This effect must be avoided when productivity is the primary marker of success. Here we describe nine metrics that can develop and sustain Hyper productive Teams -- Velocity, Work Capacity, Focus Factor, Percentage of Adopted Work, Percentage of Found Work, Accuracy of Estimation, Accuracy of Forecast, Targeted Value Increase, Success at Scale, and the Win/Loss Record of the Team. The unique contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how a light touch and lightweight strategy can be used to compare Teams with different Story Point reference scales.

Shock Therapy: A Bootstrap for Hyper-Productive Scrum

A properly implemented Scrum framework enforces a few simple constraints that cause a team to self-organize into a state that achieves 5 to 10 times waterfall performance. Yet the majority of Scrum teams never achieve this design goal. Teams do not know how to sequence work to deliver working software at the end of a sprint. They do not know how to work with a Product Owner to get the backlog in a ready state before bringing it into a sprint and do not know how to self-organize into a hyper-productive state during a sprint. A pattern is emerging at MySpace in California and Jayway in Sweden, for bootstrapping high performing Scrum teams. Rigorous implementation of Scrum by an experienced coach creates a total immersion experience akin to Shock Therapy. Teams are trained on exactly how to implement Scrum with no deviations for several sprints. These teams consistently achieve better than 240% improvement in velocity within a few weeks. They are then able to self-organize on their own to continue to improve performance. For many developers and managers, the experience is a wake up call to agile awareness. Unfortunately, management tends to disrupt hyper-productive teams by disabling key constraints in the Scrum framework. Team velocity then falls back into mediocrity. Velocity data is provided on five hyper-productive teams at MySpace and one team at Jayway. In all but one case, management “killed the golden goose.”

Take No Prisoners: How a Venture Capital Group Does Scrum

In 2007, OpenView Venture Partners decided to adopt Scrum as best practice in software development in its portfolio companies and Scrum as the standard practice in internal operations. It is one of the first high-performance non-software Scrums that delivers twice as much value in fewer working hours. The model at OpenView provides data and a working manual on how to do Scrum outside of software development. Their aggressive removal of impediments (take no prisoners!) distinguishes them from Scrum implementations that are unable to remove institutionalized waste.

Scrum in Sales: How to Improve Account Management and Sales Processes

Like most client service units, the sales and account management teams at iSense accepted that sales are a random, reactive process. After all, customers, not sales managers, decide whether or not to buy. Then, after deciding to learn more about a certain offering, Scrum training, the teams found a way to take more control over this process. In the fall of 2010, the iSense sales and account management teams decided to adopt Scrum internally as their best practice. Scrum transformed the random process, revealing early indicators related to final sales results, and showed that the direct causes for closing a deal could be detected and controlled. Once it became possible to predict and influence final order intake and sales numbers, the sales teams used early predictive indicators to proactively control their work. With the sales processes under better control, the teams could improve continuously and have more fun at work. Strategically implementing Scrum into sales and account management has lead to escalating revenue and a sustainable competitive advantage.

Organizational Transformation with Scrum: How a Venture Capital Group Gets Twice as Much Done with Half the Work

OpenView Venture Partners is a venture capital fund that uses Scrum as best practice in software development and for project management in all other parts of the organization. OpenView is the first high-performance non-software Scrums that has documented twice as much value produced in fewer working hours. The model at OpenView provides a working manual on how to do Scrum outside of software development. Their aggressive removal of impediments (take no prisoners!) distinguishes them from Scrum implementations that are captive of their institutionalized waste. The founder of OpenView saw that maximum productivity in Scrum occurs at a sustainable pace with less hours of work per week than without Scrum. He set the goal of reducing hours of work while doubling production and the Scrum teams exceeded his expectations. Focus on removal of impediments led to reorganization of the teams several times a year and showed how to capitalize on Scrum as a powerful organizational transformation tool.