This book is dedicated to Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and the

Grameen Bank for originating microenterprise development and the

Accion International Presidents Advisory Board, responsible for much
of microenterprise development in the western hemisphere.
The strategy for bootstrapping the poor out of poverty has been
a model for freeing hundreds of thousands of software developers from
developer abuse caused by poor management practices.

Thanks to the reviewers of the text who include among many others:
Tom Poppendieck
Henrik Kniberg
Rowan Bunning
Clifford Thompson
Jim Coplien

About this book

This manual is based on The Scrum Papers, published by Scrum, Inc.

For information on how to receive your own copy, please contact the
author:

Jeff Sutherland
Scrum, Inc.
One Broadway, 14th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142
[email protected]

Executive Summary

Scrum is an agile method designed to add

energy, focus, clarity, and transparency to
project planning and implementation.
Today, Scrum is used in small, mid-sized
and large software corporations all over
the world. It is being used in more and
more areas beyond software.

Properly implemented, Scrum will:

Increase speed of development

Align individual and corporate objectives
Create a culture driven by performance
Support shareholder value creation
Achieve stable and consistent
communication of
performance at all levels
Enhance individual development and quality
of life

This handbook gives some basic

information on how to get started with
Scrum, and also describes some cases in
point. It is based on The Scrum Papers,
published by Scrum, Inc. (see
www.scruminc.com).

Contents

Preface 5
Scrum at a Glance 6
The Scrum Roles 14
Getting Started with Scrum 18
Scrum Cases 38
The SirsiDynix Case 46
Can Scrum projects fail? 59

Appendix

Whos who in Scrum

Reference

In only twenty years

Scrum has risen from being a method used by a number of enthusiasts

at the Easel Corporation in 1993, to one of the worlds most popular
and well-known frameworks for development of software. The
continued expansion of the global rollout of Scrum is testimony to the
fact that Scrum delivers on its promise.

While it is often said that Scrum is not a silver bullet, Scrum can be
like a heat-seeking missile
when pointed in the right
direction. Its inspect and
adapt approach to
continuous quality
improvement can transform
outmoded business practices.
By focusing on building
communities of stakeholders,
encouraging a better life for
developers, and delivering
extreme business value to
customers, Scrum can
release creativity and team
spirit in practitioners and
make the world a better
place to live and work.

Scrum has emerged from a rough structure for iterative, incremental

development to a refined, well-structured, straight- forward framework
for complex product development. Ive worked with others to adjust,
test, and adjust it again until it is solid. This framework is fully defined
in the Scrum Guide at www.scrum.org, where Ken Schwaber and I
sustain and help it emerge further.

The manual you are holding has been compiled from papers and
compendiums that have been used at Scrum, Inc. (The Scrum
Papers). We hope that it may serve both as an inspiration and a
source of information for those readers who intend to start their first
Scrum projects in their organizations. Seasoned Scrum users may also
find some nuggets of wisdom. In any case, we appreciate all kinds of
feedback. The Scrum adventure has just begun for all of us!

Chapter One
Scrum at a Glance

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for projects

and product or application development.

Scrum structures development in cycles of work called Sprints. These

iterations are less than one month in length, and usually measured in
weeks. Sprints take place one after the other. The Sprints are of fixed
duration they end on a specific date whether the work has been
completed or not, and are never extended. Hence, they are said to be
time boxed.

At the beginning of each Sprint, a cross-functional team selects items

(customer requirements) from a prioritized list. They commit to
complete the items by the end of the Sprint. During the Sprint, the
chosen items do not change. Every day the Team gathers briefly to re-
plan its work to optimize the likelihood of meeting commitments.

At the end of the Sprint, the team reviews the Sprint with stakeholders,
and demonstrates what they have built. People obtain feedback that
can be incorporated in the next
Sprint.

Inspect & adapt

Scrum emphasizes a working product

at the end of the Sprint that is really
done. In the case of software, this
means code that is:

Integrated
Fully Tested
Potentially Shippable

A major theme in Scrum is inspect and Scrum A Rugby Term

adapt. Since development inevitably involves Scrum [---] in the sports
learning, innovation, and surprises, Scrum of rugby union and rugby
emphasizes taking a short step of league, is a way of
development, inspecting both the resulting restarting the game, either
product and the efficacy of current practices, after an accidental
and then adapting the product goals and infringement or (in rugby
process practices. Repeat forever. league only) when the ball
has gone out of play. [---]
[A] scrum is formed by the
Agile Development and Scrum players who are designated
Scrum is, as the reader supposedly knows, an forwards binding together in
agile method. The agile family of three rows. The scrum then
development methods evolved from the old engages with the opposition
and well-known iterative and incremental life- team so that the players
cycle approaches. They were born out of a heads are interlocked with
belief that an approach more grounded in those of the other side's front
human reality and the product development row. The scrum half from the
team that did not infringe
reality of learning, innovation, and change
then throws the ball into the
would yield better results.
tunnel created in the space
between the two sets of front
Agile principles emphasize building working rowers legs. Both teams may
software that people can get hands on quickly, then try to compete for the
versus spending a lot of time writing ball by trying to hook the ball
specifications up front. Agile development backwards with their feet.
focuses on cross- functional teams (From Wikipedia)
empowered to make decisions, versus big

hierarchies and compartmentalization by function. It also focuses on

rapid iteration, with continuous customer input along the way. Often
when people learn about agile development or Scrum, theres a
glimmer of recognition it sounds a lot like back in the start-up days
when we just did it.

Scrum was strongly influenced by a 1986 Harvard Business Review

article on the practices associated with successful product
development groups by Professors Takeuchi and Nonaka. in this paper
the term Scrum was introduced, relating successful development to
the game of Rugby in which a self-organizing (self- managing) team
moves together down the field of product development. The first
Scrum team was created at Easel Corporation in 1993 by Dr. Jeff
Sutherland (the author of this manual) and the Scrum framework was
formalized in 1995 by Jeff and Ken Schwaber.

Scrums Reach

Today, Scrum is used by companies large and small, including:

Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Adobe

Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon
Johns Hopkins APL, Los Alamos Laboratories
Siemens, SAP, Oracle, IBM, Pegasystems
Nokia, Motorola, British Telecom, Telefonica/O2
Cisco, Alcatel, Ericsson
GE
Capital One, Wells Fargo, Vanguard, Saxo Bank
US Federal Reserve

Teams using Scrum report significant improvements, and in some

cases complete transformations, in both productivity and morale. For
product developers many of whom have been burned by the
management fad of the month club this is significant. Or to put it
clearly: Scrum is just simple and powerful!

10

Part 1
Scrum Basics

11







Three Roles:
Chapter 1

How Scrum Works

Product Owner
Takes the inputs of what the
The Product Backlog
product should be and
A Scrum project is driven by a product translates them into a
vision created by the Product Owner, product vision or a Product
and expressed in the Product Backlog. Backlog.
The Product Backlog is a prioritized list
of whats required, ranked in order of
value to the customer or business, with
the highest value items at the top of the
list. The Product Backlog evolves over
the lifetime of the project, and items are
continuously added, removed or
reprioritized. The Team
Makes the product envisioned
by the Product Owner.
The Sprint
Scrum structures product development
in cycles of work called Sprints,
iterations of work that are typically 14
weeks in length. The Sprints are of fixed
duration and end on a specific date
whether the work has been completed Scrum Master
or not; they are never extended. Does whatever it takes to
make the Scrum Team
successful, such as removing
Sprint Planning
organizational impediments,
At the beginning of each Sprint, the Sprint facilitating meetings, acting
Planning Meeting takes place. The Product as a gatekeeper so no one
Owner and Team (with facilitation from the unnecessary interrupts the
ScrumMaster) reviews the Product Backlog, team's work.

12







discuss the goals and context for the items, and the Team selects the
items from the Product Backlog to commit to complete by the end of the
Sprint, starting at the top of the Product Backlog. Each item selected from
the Product Backlog is designed and then broken down to a set of
granulated steps. This list of backlog items is recorded in a document
called the Sprint Backlog.

Daily Standup
Once the Sprint has started, the Team engages in
another of the key Scrum practices: The Daily Stand-Up
Meeting. This is a short (15 minutes) meeting that
happens every workday at an appointed time. Everyone
on the team attends. At this meeting, the information
needed to inspect progress is presented. This
information may result in re-planning and further
discussions immediately after the Daily Standup.

Sprint Review
After the Sprint ends, there is the Sprint Review, where the
Scrum Team and stakeholders inspect what was done
during the Sprint, discuss it, and figure out what to do next.
Present at this meeting are the Product Owner, Team
Members, and ScrumMaster, plus customers, stakeholders,
experts, executives, and anyone else interested.

Sprint Retrospective
Following the Sprint Review, the team gets together for the
Sprint Retrospective which is an opportunity for the team
to discuss whats working and whats not working, and
agree on changes to try.

13

Whats Wrong With Traditional Software

Development?

The traditional way to build software, used by companies big and small,
was a sequential life cycle of which there are many variants (such as
the V-Model). Commonly, it is known as The Waterfall.

It typically begins with a detailed planning phase, where the end

product is carefully thought through, designed, and documented in
great detail.

The tasks necessary to execute the design are determined, and the
work is organized using tools such as Gantt charts and applications
such as Microsoft Project. The team arrives at an estimate of how long
the development will take by adding up detailed estimates of the
individual steps involved.

Once stakeholders have thoroughly reviewed the plan and provided

their approvals, the team starts to work.

Team members complete their specialized portion of the work, and

then hand it off to others in production-line fashion.

Once the work is complete, it is delivered to a testing organization

(some call this Quality Assurance), which completes testing prior to
the product reaching the customer. Throughout the process, strict
controls are placed on deviations from the plan to ensure that what is
produced is actually what was designed.

14

This approach has strengths and weaknesses. Its great strength is that
it is supremely logical think before you build, write it all down, follow
a plan, and keep everything as organized as possible. It has just one
great weakness: humans are involved. Hence a lot of problems occur:

Creativity Is Inhibited
This approach requires that the good ideas all come at the beginning
of the release cycle, where they can be incorporated into the plan. But
as we all know, good ideas appear throughout the process in the
beginning, the middle, and sometimes even the day before launch. A
process that does not permit change will stifle this innovation. With the
waterfall, a great idea late in the release cycle is not a gift, its a threat.

Written Documents Have Limitations

The waterfall approach places a great emphasis on writing things down
as a primary method for communicating critical information. The very
reasonable assumption is that if I can write down on paper as much as
possible of whats in my head, it will more reliably make it into the
head of everyone else on the team; plus, if its on paper, there is
tangible proof that Ive done my job. The reality, though, is that most
of the time these highly detailed 50-page requirements documents just
do not get read. When they do get read, the misunderstandings are
often compounded. A written document is an incomplete picture of my
ideas; when you read it, you create another abstraction, which is now
two steps away from what I think I meant to say at that time. It is no
surprise that serious misunderstandings occur.

Bad Timing

15

Something else that happens when you have humans involved is the
hands- on aha moment the first time that you actually use the
working product. You immediately think of 20 ways you could have
made it better. Unfortunately, these very valuable insights often come
at the end of the release cycle, when changes are most difficult and
disruptive in other words, when doing the right thing is most
expensive, at least when using a traditional method.

No Crystal Balls
Humans are not able to predict the future. For example, your
competition makes an announcement that was not expected.
Unanticipated technical problems crop up that force a change in
direction. Furthermore, people are particularly bad at planning
uncertain things far into the future guessing today how you will be
spending your week eight months from now is something of a fantasy.
It has been the downfall of many a carefully constructed Gantt chart.

Too Much Work and No Fun

In addition, a sequential life cycle tends to foster an adversarial
relationship between the people that are handing work off from one to
the next. Hes asking me to build something thats not in the
specification. Shes changing her mind. I cant be held responsible
for something I dont control. And this gets us to another observation
about sequential development it is not much fun. The waterfall
model is a cause of great misery for the people who build products.
The resulting products fall well short of expressing the creativity, skill,
and passion of their creators. People are not robots, and a process that
requires them to act like robots results in unhappiness.

Sub-optimized results

16

A rigid, change-resistant process produces mediocre products.

Customers may get what they first ask for (at least two translation
steps removed), but is it what they really want once they see the
product? By gathering all the requirements up front and having them
set in stone, the product is condemned to be only as good as the initial
idea, instead of being the best once people have learned or discovered
new things.

Practitioners of a sequential life cycle experience these shortcomings

again and again. But, it seems so supremely logical that the common
reaction is to turn inward: If only we did it better, it would work, and
if we just planned more, documented more, resisted change more,
everything would work smoothly. Unfortunately, many teams find just
the opposite: the harder they try, the worse it gets! There are also
management teams that have invested their reputation and many
resources in a waterfall model; changing to a fundamentally different
model is an apparent admission of having made a mistake. And Scrum
is fundamentally different ...

17

Chapter 2

The Scrum Roles

In Scrum, there are three primary roles: The Product Owner, The
Team and The Scrum Master.

The Product Owner

The Product Owner is responsible for
maximizing return on investment (ROI) by
identifying product features, translating these
into a prioritized feature list, deciding which
should be at the top of the list for the next
Sprint, and continually re- prioritizing and
refining the list.

The Product Owner has profit and loss

responsibility for the product, assuming it is a commercial product. In
the case of an internal application, the Product Owner is not
responsible for ROI in the sense of a commercial product (that will
generate revenue), but they are still responsible for maximizing ROI in
the sense of choosing each Sprint the highest- business-value
lowest-cost items.

Not a Product Manager

In some cases, the Product Owner and the customer are the same
person; this is common for internal applications. In others, the
customer might be millions of people with a variety of needs, in which

18

case the Product Owner role is similar to the Product Manager or

Product Marketing Manager position in many product organizations.

However, the Product Owner is somewhat different than a traditional

Product Manager because they actively and frequently interact with the
team, personally offering the priorities and reviewing the results each
two- or four-week iteration, rather than delegating development
decisions to a project manager. It is important to note that in Scrum
there is one and only one person who serves as and has the final
authority of Product Owner. In multi- team programs, this one
Product Owner may delegate the work to Product Owners that
represent him or her on subordinate teams, but all decisions and
direction come from the top-level, single Product Owner.

The Team
The Team builds the product that the
customer is going to use: the application or
website, for example. The Scrum team is
cross-functional and includes all the
expertise necessary to deliver the
potentially shippable product each Sprint. It
is also self-organizing (self-managing), with
a very high degree of autonomy and
accountability.

Hence, there is no team manager or project

manager in Scrum. Instead, the Team members decide what to
commit to, and how best to accomplish that commitment. The Team is
self- organizing.

19

The Scrum Team includes the Product Owner and the Scrum Master.
However, the Team often refers to those implementing the Sprint
Backlog, which may or may not include the Product Owner or the
Scrum Master.

Dedicated Team
The Scrum Team is seven plus or minus two people. For a software
product the Team working on the Sprint Backlog might include
programmers, interface designers, and testers. The Team develops the
product and provides ideas to the Product Owner about how to make
the product great. In my experience, it is essential that the Team is
100 percent dedicated to the work for one product during the Sprint;
multitasking across multiple products or projects will severely limit
performance.

Stable Teams are associated with higher productivity, so changing

team members should also be avoided. Application groups with many
people are organized into multiple Scrum teams, each focused on
different features for the product, with close coordination of their
efforts. Since one Team does all the work (planning, analysis,
programming, and test) for a complete customer-centric feature,
Scrum teams are also known as feature teams. In very technically
complex programs and products, Ive seen Teams organized by
architectural layer - such as when product family architectures are
employed. However, integration prior to the end of the Sprint is more
difficult when Teams are so structured.

20

The Scrum Master

The Scrum Master helps the product group
learn and apply Scrum to achieve business
value. The Scrum Master does whatever is in
their power to help the team be successful.

The Scrum Master is not the manager of the

team or a project manager; instead, the Scrum
Master serves the team, protects them from outside interference, and
educates and guides the Product Owner and the team in the skillful
use of Scrum. The Scrum Master makes sure everyone on the team
(including the Product Owner, and those in management) understands
and follows the practices of Scrum. They also help lead the
organization through the often difficult changes required to achieve
success with agile development.

Commitment is Important
Since Scrum makes visible many impediments and threats to the
teams and Product Owners effectiveness, it is important to have an
engaged Scrum Master working energetically to help resolve those
issues. If not, the team or Product Owner will find it difficult to succeed.
Scrum teams should have a dedicated full-time Scrum Master,
although a smaller team might have a team member play this role
(carrying a lighter load of regular work when they do so). Great Scrum
Masters can come from any background or discipline: Engineering,
Design, Testing, Product Management, Project Management, or Quality
Management.

The Scrum Master and the Product Owner cannot be the same
individual; at times, the Scrum Master may be called upon to push
back on the Product Owner (for example, if they try to introduce new

21

deliverables in the middle of a Sprint). And unlike a project manager,

the Scrum Master does not tell people what to do or assign tasks
they facilitate the process, supporting the team as it organizes and
manages itself. If the Scrum Master was previously in a position
managing the team, they will need to significantly change their
mindset and style of interaction for the team to be successful with
Scrum. In the case that an ex-manager transitions to the role of
Scrum Master, it is best to serve a team other than the one that they
used to supervise.

What About Managers?

Note that there is no role of project manager in Scrum. Sometimes an

(ex-) project manager can step into the role of Scrum Master, but this
has a mixed record of success there is a fundamental difference
between the two roles, both in day-to-day responsibilities and in the
mindset required to be successful.

In addition to the three Scrum roles, there are other contributors to

the success of the product, including managers. While their role
changes, they are invaluable. For example:

They create a business model that works and provide resources

the team needs
They support the team by respecting the rules and spirit of
Scrum
They help remove impediments that the team identifies
They make their expertise and experience available to the team
They challenge the team to move beyond mediocrity

22

In Scrum, these individuals replace the time they previously spent

playing the role of nanny (assigning tasks, getting status reports,
and other forms of micromanagement) with time as guru and
servant of the team (mentoring, coaching, helping remove obstacles,
helping problem-solve, providing creative input, and guiding the skills
development of team members). In this shift, managers may need to
change their management style; for example, using Socratic
questioning to help the team discover the solution to a problem, rather
than simply deciding a solution and assigning it to the team.

23

Chapter 3

Getting Started
Initiating a Scrum project is not hard, as long as one takes one step at
a time, and makes sure that everyone feels included.

The Product Backlog

The first step in Scrum is for the Product
Owner to articulate the product vision.
Eventually, this evolves into the refined and
prioritized list of features, the Product
Backlog.

This backlog exists and evolves over the

lifetime of the product; it is the product road
map. At any point, the Product Backlog is
the single, definitive view of everything that could be done by the
team ever, in order of priority. Only a single Product Backlog exists;
this means the Product Owner is required to make prioritization
decisions across the entire spectrum.

24

The Product Backlog includes a variety

How Much Detail? of items, primarily new customer
One of the myths about Scrum is
that it prevents you from writing
features (enable all users to place
detailed specifications; in reality, book in shopping cart), but also
it is up to the Product Owner and engineering improvement goals
Team to decide how much detail
(rework the transaction processing
is required, and this will vary from
one backlog item to the next,
module to make it scalable),
depending on the insight of the exploratory or research work
team, and other factors. State (investigate solutions for speeding up
what is important in the least credit card validation), performance
amount of space necessary in
and security requirements, and,
other words, do not describe
every possible detail of an item, possibly, known defects (diagnose
just make clear what is necessary and fix the order processing script
for it to be understood. Low errors), if there are only a few
priority items, which are likely to
problems. (A system with many
be implemented at a later stage
and are usually coarsegrained, defects usually has a separate defect
have fewer requirement details. tracking system.) Many people like to
High priority and fine-grained articulate the requirements in terms of
items that will soon be
user stories - concise, clear
implemented tend to have more
detail. For more on structuring
descriptions of the functionality in
Product Backlog, a study of lean terms of its value to the end user of
thinking, particularly lean the product. In more demanding
inventory and just-in-time order
environments, such as FDA life critical
processing, will prove
instructional.
applications, Use Cases are often used.

The subset of the Product Backlog that is intended for the current
release is known as the Release Backlog, and in general, this portion is
the primary focus of the Product Owner.

25

The Product Backlog leads the way ahead for the Scrum Team. Maintained by Product Owner.

The Product Backlog is continuously updated by the Product Owner to

reflect changes in the needs of the customer, new ideas or insights,
moves by the competition, technical hurdles that appear, and so forth.
The team provides the Product Owner with estimates of the effort
required for each item on the Product Backlog. In addition, the Product
Owner is responsible for assigning a business value estimate to each
individual item. This is often an unfamiliar practice for a Product Owner.
With the two estimates (effort and value) and perhaps with additional
risk estimates, the Product Owner prioritizes the backlog (actually,
usually just the Release Backlog subset) to maximize ROI (choosing
items of high value with low effort) or secondarily, to reduce some
major risk. As will be seen, these effort and value estimates may be
refreshed each Sprint as people learn; consequently, this is a
continuous re-prioritization activity and the Product Backlog is ever
evolving.

Scrum does not mandate the form of estimates in the Product Backlog,
but it is common to use relative estimates expressed as points rather
than absolute units of effort such as person-weeks.

26

Team Planning Over time, a team tracks how many relative

A key practice in Scrum
points they implement each Sprint; for
is that the team decides
how much work they example, averaging 26 points per Sprint.
will commit to With this information they can project a
complete, rather than
release date to complete all features, or how
having it assigned to
them by the Product many features will likely be completed by a
Owner. This makes for a date. Standard deviations around the average
more reliable
points will indicate least likely and most likely
commitment because
the team is making it possibilities. The number of points completed
based on their own per Sprint is called the velocity of the team. A
analysis and planning,
realistic release plan is always based on the
rather than having it
made for them by velocity of the team.
someone else.

The items in the Product Backlog can vary

significantly in size or effort. Larger ones are broken into smaller items
during the Product Backlog Refinement
workshop or the Sprint Planning
Meeting, and smaller ones may be
consolidated.

Sprint Planning
The Sprint Planning Meeting opens the
Sprint. It is divided into two distinct
sub-meetings, the first of which is
called Sprint Planning Part One.

In Sprint Planning Part One, the

Product Owner and Team (with
facilitation from the Scrum Master) review the high-priority items in
the Product Backlog that the Product Owner is interested in

27

implementing this Sprint. They discuss the goals and context for these
high-priority items on the Product Backlog, providing the Team with
insight into the Product Owners thinking. The Product Owner and
Team also review the Definition of Done that all items must meet,
such as, Done means coded to standards, reviewed, implemented
with unit test-driven development (TDD), tested with 100 percent test
automation, integrated, and documented. This definition of done
ensures transparency and quality fit for the purpose of the product and
organization.

Part One focuses on understanding what the Product Owner wants.

According to the rules of Scrum, at the end of Part One the (always
busy) Product Owner may leave although they must be available (for
example, by phone) during the next meeting. However, they are
welcome to attend Part Two...

Sprint Planning Part Two, often referred to as Sprint Refinement,

focuses on detailed task planning for how to implement the items that
the team decides to take on. The Team selects the items from the
Product Backlog they commit to complete by the end of the Sprint,
starting at the top of the Product Backlog (in others words, starting
with the items that are the highest priority for the Product Owner) and
working down the list in order.

While the Product Owner does not have control over how much the
team commits to, he or she knows that the items the team is
committing to are drawn from the top of the Product Backlog in
other words, the items that he or she has rated as most important.
The team has the authority to also select items from further down the
list in consultation with the Product Owner; this usually happens when

28

the team and Product Owner realize that something of lower priority
fits easily and appropriately with the high priority items.

The Sprint Planning Meeting should be

One Item at a Time time boxed to four hours for a four-week
Sprint and two hours for a two-week
During task generation and
estimation in Sprint Planning Sprint. In order to do this, the team must
it is not necessary nor help the Product Owner by estimating the
appropriate for Team
size of stories before the Sprint Planning
members to volunteer for all
the tasks they can do best. meeting the team is making a serious
Rather, it is better to only commitment to complete the work, and
volunteer for one task at a
this commitment requires careful thought
time, when it is time to pick
up a new task and to to be successful. A Team bases its
consider deliberately commitments on its past velocities. If a
choosing tasks that will
involve learning (perhaps by
Team is new, new to the technology or
pair work with a specialist). domain, it may not have reliable, stable
velocities until it has worked together for
three or four Sprints. In making its commitment, the Team factors in
any vacations, new organizational demands, and other items that may
reduce its past velocity.

Once the Team capacity available is determined, the Team starts with
the first item on the Product Backlog in other words, the Product
Owners highest priority item and working together, breaks it down
into individual stories, which are recorded in a document called the
Sprint Backlog (see below). As mentioned, the Product Owner must be
available during Part Two (such as via the phone) so that clarifications
and decisions regarding alternative approaches is possible. The team
will move sequentially down the Product Backlog in this way, until its
used up all its capacity. At the end of the meeting, the team will have
produced a list of tasks with estimates (typically in hours or fractions

29

of a day). The list is a starting point, but more tasks will emerge as
the Team addresses each Product Backlog item during the Sprint. The
Team will work on a technical design that will be implemented using
Sprint Backlog tasks. The team choses the ordering of Sprint Backlog
tasks to maximize the velocity of production and quality of done
functionality.

Scrum encourages multi-skilled workers, rather than only working to

job title such as a tester only doing testing. In other words, team
members go to where the work is and help out as possible. If there
are many testing tasks, then all Team members may help. This does
not imply that everyone is a generalist; no doubt some people are
especially skilled in testing (and so on) but Team members work
together and learn new skills from each
other. Pairing has proven a valuable No Changing Goals
There are powerful, positive
approach to sharing knowledge.
factors that arise from the
team being protected from
All that said, there are rare times when a changing goals during the
Sprint:
Team member may do a particular task
because it would take far too long or be First, the team gets to
impossible for others to learn perhaps work knowing with
absolute certainty that its
he or she is the only person with the
commitments will not
artistic skill to draw pictures. Other Team change, thus reinforcing
members could not draw a stick man if the teams focus on
ensuring completion.
their lives depended on it. In this rare
case and if it is not rare and not getting Second, it disciplines the
rarer as the Team learns, there is Product Owner into really
thinking through the items
something wrong it may be necessary to
he or she prioritizes on the
ask if the total planned drawing tasks that Product Backlog and offers
must be done by this certain Team to the team for the Sprint.

member are feasible within the short

30

Sprint.

One of the pillars of Scrum

is that once the Team
makes its commitment,
any additions or changes
must be deferred until the
next Sprint. This means
that if halfway through the
Sprint the Product Owner
decides there is a new
item he or she would like
the Team to work on, he
cannot make the change until the start of the next Sprint. If an
external circumstance appears that significantly changes priorities, and
means the Team would be wasting its time if it continued working, the
Product Owner or the team can terminate the Sprint. The Team stops,
and a new Sprint Planning meeting initiates a new Sprint. The
disruption of doing this is usually great; this serves as a disincentive
for the Product Owner or team to resort to this dramatic decision.

By following these Scrum rules the

Many teams also make use of
Product Owner gains two things.
a visual task-tracking tool, in
the form of a wall-sized task First, he or she has the confidence
board where tasks (written on of knowing the Team has made a
Post-It Notes) migrate during commitment to complete a realistic
the Sprint across columns and clear set of tasks they have
labeled: chosen. Over time a Team can
become quite skilled at choosing
To Do, Doing, and Done.
and delivering on a realistic
commitment. Second, the Product

31

Owner gets to make whatever changes he or she likes to the Product

Backlog before the start of the next Sprint. At that point, additions,
deletions, modifications, and re-prioritizations are all possible and
acceptable. While the Product Owner is not able to make changes to
the selected items under development during the current Sprint, he or
she is only one Sprints duration or less away from making any
changes. Gone is the stigma around change change of direction,
change of requirements, or just plain changing your mind and it may
be for this reason that Product Owners are usually as enthusiastic
about Scrum as anyone.

Daily Standup
Once the Sprint has started, the Team
engages in another of the key Scrum
practices: The Daily Standup. This is a short
(15 minutes or less) meeting that happens
every workday at an appointed time and
place. Everyone on the Team attends. To
keep it brief, it is recommended that
everyone remain standing. It is the Teams
opportunity to talk to each other and inspect
each others progress and obstacles. In the
Daily Standup, one by one, each member of
the team reports three (and only three)
things to the other members of the team:

32

WhatdidIdoyesterdaythathelpedtheDevelopmentTeammeettheSprint
Goal?

WhatwillIdotodaytohelptheDevelopmentTeammeettheSprintGoal?

DoIseeanyimpedimentthatpreventsmeortheDevelopmentTeamfrom
meetingtheSprintGoal?

Note that the Daily Standup is not a status meeting or a report to a

manager; it is a time for a self-organizing Team to share with each
other what is going on, to help it coordinate its work and optimize its
likelihood of meeting its commitments. Someone makes note of the
blocks, and the Scrum Master is responsible for helping team members
resolve them.

There is no chit-chat during the Daily Standup, only reporting answers

to the three questions; if discussion is required it takes place
immediately after the Daily Standup in a follow-up meeting, although
in Scrum no one is required to attend this. This follow-up meeting is a
common event where the Team adapts to the information they heard
in the Daily Standup: in other words, another inspect and adapt cycle.
It is generally recommended not to have managers or others in
positions of perceived authority attend the Daily Standup. This risks
making the Team feel monitored under pressure to report major
progress every day (an unrealistic expectation), and inhibited about
reporting problems and it tends to undermine the Teams self-
management, and invite micromanagement. It would be more useful
for a stakeholder to instead reach out to the team following the
meeting, and offer to help with any blocks that are slowing the Teams
progress.

33

Updating Sprint Backlog & Sprint Burndown Chart

Every day, the Team members update

their estimate of the amount of time
remaining to complete their current task
in the Sprint Backlog. Following this
update, someone adds up the points
remaining for the Team as a whole, and
plots it on the Sprint Burndown Chart.
This graph shows, each day, a new
estimate of how much work (measured
in relative points) remains until the Teams tasks are finished. Ideally,
this is a downward sloping graph that is on a trajectory to reach zero
effort remaining by the last day of the Sprint. Hence it is called a
burndown chart. And while sometimes it looks good, often it does not;
this is the reality of product development. The important thing is that
it shows the Team their progress towards their goal, not in terms of
how much time was spent in the past (an irrelevant fact in terms of
progress), but in terms of how much work remains in the future
what separates the Team from their goal.

34

Sprint Burndown Chart. While the Sprint Burndown chart can be created and
displayed using a spreadsheet, many teams find it is more effective to show it on
paper on a wall in their workspace, with updates in pen; this low-tech/high-touch
solution is fast, simple, and often more visible than a computer chart.

If the burndown line is not tracking downwards towards completion by

mid-Sprint, the team needs to execute the Scrum Emergency
Procedure:

1. Change the approach to the work or remove impediments to

increase velocity.
2. Get help by having someone outside the team take some of
the backlog.
3. Reduce the scope of work.

35







4. Abort the Sprint.

It is important that the Scrum Master coach the Team to take action
early rather than drifting into Sprint failure. Some Scrum Masters
insist that a Team reduce its commitments in early Sprints. Successful
Teams consistently improve by building on success. Failing Teams stay
stuck at low velocity.

Product Backlog Refinement

One of the lesser known, but valuable,

guidelines in Scrum is that five or ten percent
of each Sprint must be dedicated by the
Product Owner and the team to refining the
Product Backlog. This includes:

Detailed requirements analysis

Splitting large items into smaller ones
Estimation of new items
Re-estimation of existing items

A regularly scheduled Weekly meeting with the Product Owner is

enough for experienced Teams to refine the Product Backlog. This
refinement activity is not for items selected for the current Sprint; it is
for items for the future, most likely in the next one or two Sprints.
With this practice, Sprint Planning becomes relatively simple because
the Product Owner and Scrum Team start the planning with a clear,
well analyzed and carefully estimated set of items. A sign that this
refinement process is not being done (or not being done well) is that
Sprint Planning involves significant questions, discovery, or confusion.

36

Ending the Sprint

One of the core tenets of Scrum is that the duration of the Sprint is
never extended it ends on the assigned date regardless of whether
the Team has completed the work it committed to. Teams typically
over-commit in the first few Sprints and fail to meet objectives. Teams
might then overcompensate and under-commit, and finish early. But
by the third or fourth Sprint, a Team typically has figured out what it
are capable of delivering (most of the time), and it will meet its Sprint
goals more reliably after that. Teams are encouraged to pick one
duration for Sprints (say, two weeks) and not change it. A consistent
duration helps the Team learn how much it can accomplish, which
helps in both estimation and longer-term release planning. It also
helps the Team achieve a rhythm for their work; this is often referred
to as the heartbeat of the team in Scrum.

Sprint Review

After the Sprint ends, there is the Sprint

Review, where the team reviews the
Sprint with the Product Owner. This is
often mislabeled the demo but that
does not capture the real intent of this
meeting. A key idea in Scrum is inspect
and adapt. To see and learn what is
going on and then evolve based on
feedback, in repeating cycles. The Sprint
Review is an inspect and adapt activity
for the product. It is a time for the

37

Product Owner and key stakeholders to learn what is going on with the
product and with the Team (that is, a review of the Sprint); and for
the Team to learn what is going on with the Product Owner and the
market. Consequently, the most important element of the Review is an
in-depth conversation and collaboration between the Team and
Product Owner to learn the situation, to get advice, and so forth. The
review includes a demo of what the Team built during the Sprint, but if
the focus of the review is a demo rather than conversation, there is an
imbalance.

Present at this meeting are the Product Owner, Team members, and
Scrum Master, plus customers, stakeholders, experts, executives, and
anyone else interested. The demo portion of the Sprint Review is not a
presentation the team gives there is no slideware. A guideline in
Scrum is that as little time as possible should be spent on preparing
for the Sprint Review; Scrum suggests no more than 2 hours. It is
simply a demo of what has been built. Anyone present is free to ask
questions and give input.

38

The Sprint Retrospective

The Sprint Review involves One Way To Do It.

A simple way to structure the Sprint
inspect Retrospective is to draw four columns on
and adapt a whiteboard, labeled:
regarding
What went well?
the What could have been better?
product. Things to try?
The Sprint Issues to escalate?

Retrospec Then go around the room, with each

tive, person adding one or more items to the
which lists. As items are repeated, check marks
are added next to them, so the common
follows the Review, involves items become clear. Then the team looks
inspect and adapt regarding for underlying causes, and agrees on a
the process. This is a practice small number of changes to try in the
upcoming Sprint, along with a
that some teams skip which is commitment to review the results at the
unacceptable, because self- next Sprint Retrospective.
organization requires the
A useful practice at the end of the
frequent regular reflection
Retrospective is for the team to label each
provided by the Retrospective. of the items in each column with either a
Its the main mechanism for C if it is caused by Scrum (in other
words, without Scrum it would not be
taking the visibility that Scrum happening), or an E if it is exposed by
provides into areas of Scrum (in other words, it would be
potential improvement, and happening with or without Scrum, but
Scrum makes it known to the team), or a
turning it into results. Its an U if its unrelated to Scrum (like the
opportunity for the entire weather). The team may find a lot of Cs on
Scrum Team to discuss whats the Whats Working Well side of the
board, and a lot of Es on the What Could
working and whats not Work Better ; this is good news, even if
working, and agree on the What Could Work Better list is a long
changes to try. Sometimes the one, because the first step to solving
underlying issues is making them visible,
and Scrum is a powerful catalyst for that.

39








Scrum Master can act as an effective facilitator for the retrospective,
but it may be better to find a neutral outsider to facilitate the meeting;
a good approach is for Scrum Masters to facilitate each others
retrospectives, which enables cross-pollination among teams.

Updating Release Backlog & Burndown Chart

At this point, some items have been finished, some have been added,
some have new estimates, and some have been dropped from the
release goal. The Product Owner is responsible for ensuring that these
changes are reflected in the Release Backlog (and more broadly, the
Product Backlog). In addition, Scrum includes a Release Burndown
chart that shows progress towards the release date. It is analogous to
the Sprint Burndown chart, but is at the higher level of items
(requirements) rather than fine-grained tasks. Since a new Product
Owner is unlikely to know why or how to create this chart, this is
another opportunity for a Scrum Master to help the Product Owner.

Estimate of Estimate
Priority 1 2 3
value of Effort
As a user I want to put a book in
my cart (see UI sketches on wiki 1 7 5 0 0 0
page)
As a buyer I want to remove a
2 6 7 0 0 0
book from my shopping cart.
Improve transaction processing
performance (see metrics on 3 6 13 13 0 0
wiki)
Investigate solutions for speeding
up credit card transactions (see 4 6 20 20 20 0
metrics on wiki.

40












Upgrade all servers to latest
5 5 13 13 13 13
version of Apache
Diagnose and fix order processing
6 2 3 3 3 3
script errors (bugzilla ID 48133)
As a buyer I want to add items to
7 7 40 40 40 40
my wish list
As a buyer I want to delete items
8 4 20 20 20 20
on my wish list

And so on
New estimate of effort remaining
Total 537 580 570 500
at the end of each Sprint

Release Backlog (a subset of the Product Backlog)

Release Burndown Chart

600
550
500
450
Story Points

400
350
300 Actual

250

200 Ideal
150
100
50
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Sprint

41







Starting the Next Sprint

Following the Sprint Review, the Product Owner may update the
Product Backlog with any new insights. At this point, the Product
Owner and Team are ready to begin another Sprint cycle. There is no
down time between Sprints teams normally go from a Sprint
Retrospective one afternoon into the next Sprint Planning the following
morning (or after the weekend).

One of the principles of agile development is sustainable pace, and

only by working regular hours at a reasonable level can teams
continue this cycle indefinitely.

Release Sprint
The perfection vision of Scrum is that the product is potentially
shippable at the end of each Sprint, which implies there is no wrap up
work required, such as testing or documentation. Rather, the
implication is that everything is completely finished every Sprint; that
you could actually ship it or deploy it immediately after the Sprint
Review.

However, many organizations have weak development practices and

cannot achieve this perfection, or there are other extenuating
circumstances (such as, the machine broke). In this case, there will
be some remaining work, such as final production environment
integration testing, and so there will be the need for a Release Sprint
to handle this remaining work. A goal of any Scrum Team is to
minimize the number of Release Sprints for completing undone work.
Undone work tends to accumulate exponentially and causes poor
product quality.

42

Release Planning & Initial Product Backlog Refinement

A question that is sometimes asked is how, in an iterative model, can
long-term release planning be done. There are two cases to consider:

1. A new product in its first release

2. An existing product in a later release

In the case of a new product, or an existing product just adopting

Scrum, there is the need to
do initial Product Backlog Change Thyself!
refinement before the first One common mistake teams make, when
presented with a Scrum practice that
Sprint, where the Product
challenges them, is to change Scrum, not
Owner and team shape a change themselves. For example, teams
proper Scrum Product that have trouble delivering on their Sprint
Backlog. This could take a commitment might decide to make the
few days or a week, and Sprint duration extendable, so they never
run out of time and in the process,
involves a vision workshop,
ensure they never have to learn how to do
some detailed requirements a better job of estimating and managing
analysis, and estimation of their time. In this way, without coaching
all the items identified for and the support of an experienced Scrum
the first release. Master, organizations can mutate Scrum
into just a mirror image of its own
weaknesses and dysfunction, and
Surprisingly in Scrum, in the undermine the real benefit that Scrum
case of an established offers: making visible the good and the
product with an established bad, and giving the organization the choice
Product Backlog, there of elevating itself to a higher level.

should not be the need for

any special or extensive release planning for the next release. Why?
Because the Product Owner and team should be doing Product Backlog
refinement every Sprint (five or ten percent of each Sprint),

43

continuously preparing for the future. This continuous product

development mode obviates the need for the dramatic punctuated
prepare-execute-conclude stages one sees in traditional sequential life
cycle development.

During an initial Product Backlog refinement workshop and during the

continuous backlog refinement each Sprint, the Team and Product
Owner will do release planning, refining the estimates, priorities, and
content as they learn.

Some releases are date-driven; for example: We will release version

2.0 of our project at a trade-show on November 10. In this situation,
the team will complete as many Sprints (and build as many features)
as is possible in the time available. Other products require certain
features to be built before they can be called complete and the product
will not launch until these requirements are satisfied, however long
that takes. Since Scrum emphasizes producing potentially shippable
code each Sprint, the Product Owner may choose to start doing interim
releases, to allow the customer to reap the benefits of completed work
sooner.

Since they cannot possibly know everything up front, the focus is on

creating and refining a plan to give the release broad direction, and
clarify how tradeoff decisions will be made (scope versus schedule, for
example). Think of this as the roadmap guiding you towards your final
destinations; which exact roads you take and the decisions you make
during the journey may be determined en route.

Most Product Owners choose one release approach. For example, they
will decide a release date, and will work with the team to estimate the
Release Backlog items that can be completed by that date. In

44

situations where a fixed price / fixed date / fixed deliverable

commitment is required for example, contract development one or
more of those parameters must have a built-in buffer to allow for
uncertainty and change; in this respect, Scrum is no different from
other approaches. The advantage of Scrum is that new requirements
can easily be added into the release at sprint boundaries as long as
low prority requirements scheduled later can be removed and still keep
the project on time and on budget.

Application or Product Focus

For applications or products either for the market or for internal use
within an organization Scrum moves groups away from the older
project-centric model toward a continuous application/product
development model. There is no longer a project with a beginning,
middle, and end. And hence no traditional project manager. Rather,
there is simply a stable Product Owner and a long-lived self- managing
Team that collaborate in an endless series of two or four-week
Sprints, until the product or application is retired. All necessary
project management work is handled by the Team and the business
ownerwho is an internal business customer or from Product
Management. It is not managed by an IT manager or someone from a
Project Management Office.

Scrum can also be used for true projects that are one-time initiatives
(rather than work to create or evolve long-lived applications); still, in
this case the team and Product Owner do the project management.

What if there is insufficient new work from one or more existing

applications to warrant a dedicated long-lived Team for each

45

application? In this case, a stable long-lived Team may take on items

from one application in one Sprint, and then items from another in the
next Sprint; in this situation the Sprints are often quite short, such as
one week.

Occasionally, there is insufficient new work even for this last solution,
and the Team may take on items from several applications during the
same Sprint; however, beware this solution as it may devolve into
unproductive multitasking across multiple applications. A basic
productivity theme in Scrum is for the Team to be focused on one
product or application for one Sprint.

Common Challenges

Scrum is not only a concrete set of practices rather, and more

importantly, it is a framework that provides visibility to the Team, and
a mechanism that allows them to inspect and adapt accordingly.
Scrum works by making visible the dysfunction and impediments that
are impacting the Product Owner and the Teams effectiveness, so that
they can be addressed. For example, the Product Owner may not
really know the market, the features, or how to estimate their relative
business value. Or the Team may be unskilled in effort estimation or
development work.

The Scrum framework will quickly reveal these weaknesses. Scrum

does not solve the problems of development; it makes them painfully
visible, and provides a framework for people to explore ways to
resolve problems in short cycles and with small improvement
experiments.

46

Suppose the team fails to deliver what they committed to in the first
Sprint due to poor task analysis and estimation skill. To the team, this
feels like failure. But in reality, this experience is the necessary first
step toward becoming more realistic and thoughtful about their
commitments. This pattern of Scrum helping make visible
dysfunction, enabling the team to do something about it is the basic
mechanism that produces the most significant benefits that teams
using Scrum experience.

Another common mistake is to assume that a practice is discouraged

or prohibited just because Scrum does not specifically require it. For
example, Scrum does not require the Product Owner to set a long-
term strategy for his or her product; nor does it require engineers to
seek advice from more experienced engineers about complex technical
problems. Scrum leaves it to the individuals involved to make the right
decision; and in most cases, both of these practices (along with many
others) are well advised.

Distributed, Outsourced Scrum

US, European, and Japanese companies often outsource software

development to Eastern Europe, Russia, or the Far East. Typically,
remote teams operate independently and communication problems
limit productivity. While there is a large amount of published research
on project management, distributed development, and outsourcing
strategies as isolated domains, there are few detailed studies of best
project management practices on large systems that are both
distributed and outsourced.

Distributed Team Models

47

Here we consider three distributed Scrum models commonly observed

in practice:

Isolated Scrums - Teams are isolated across geographies. In most

cases off-shore teams are not cross-functional and may not be using
the Scrum process.

Distributed Scrum of Scrums Scrum teams are isolated across

geographies and integrated by a Scrum of Scrums that meets regularly
across geographies.

Totally Integrated Scrums Scrum teams are cross- functional with

members distributed across geographies. In the SirsiDynix case (see
chapter 5), the Scrum of Scrums was localized with all Scrum Masters
in Utah.

Most outsourced development efforts use a degenerative form of the

Isolated Scrums model where outsourced teams are not cross-
functional and not Agile. Requirements may be created in the U.S. and
developed in Dubai, or development may occur in Germany and quality
assurance in India. Typically, cross-cultural communication problems
are compounded by differences in work style in the primary
organization vs. the outsourced group. In the worst case, outsourced
teams are not using Scrum and their productivity is typical of waterfall
projects further delayed by cross-continent communications lag time.

Best practice recommended by the Scrum Alliance is a Distributed

Scrum of Scrums model. This model partitions work across cross-
functional, isolated Scrum teams while eliminating most dependencies
between teams. Scrum teams are linked by a Scrum-of-Scrums where
Scrum Masters (team leaders/project managers) meet regularly across

48

locations. This encourages communication, cooperation, and cross-

fertilization and is appropriate for newcomers to Agile development.

An Integrated Scrums model has all teams fully distributed and each
team has members at multiple locations. While this appears to create
communication and coordination burdens, the daily Scrum meetings
help to break down cultural barriers and disparities in work styles. On
large enterprise implementations, it can organize the project into a
single whole with an integrated global code base. Proper
implementation of this approach provides location transparency and
performance characteristics similar to small co-located teams.

49

Part Three

Scrum at Work

50

Chapter Four

Scrum Cases

This chapter serves as a retrospective on the origins of Scrum,
its evolution in different companies, and a few key learnings
along the way. It will provide a reference point for further
investigation and implementation of Scrum.

Case 1: Easel Corporation

The First Scrum

Scrum was started in 1993 for software teams at Easel Corporation,

where Jeff Sutherland was VP of object technology hired as chief
engineer to lead a small team developing the first object-oriented
design and analysis tool that incorporated round-trip engineering and
automated object-relational mapping in enterprise development.

There were some key factors that influenced the introduction of

Scrum at Easel Corporation. The book Wicked Problems, Righteous
Solutions by Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl reviewed the
reasons why the waterfall approach to software development does not
work for software development today. Requirements are not fully
understood before the project begins. The users know what they want
only after they see an initial version of the software. Requirements
change during the software construction process. And new tools and
technologies make implementation strategies unpredictable. DeGrace
and Stahl reviewed All-at-Once models of software development,
which uniquely fit object-oriented implementation of software and help
to resolve these challenges.

51

All-at-Once model
All-at-Once models of software development assume that the creation
of software is done by simultaneously working on requirements,
analysis, design, coding, and testing and then delivering the entire
system all at once. The simplest All-at-Once model is a single super-
programmer creating and delivering an application from beginning to
end. All aspects of the development process reside in a single persons
head. This is the fastest way to deliver a product that has good
internal architectural consistency, and it is the hackers mode of
implementation. The next level of approach to All-at-Once
development is handcuffing two programmers together, as in the XP
practice of pair programming.

Two developers deliver the entire system together. This is been shown
to deliver better code (in terms of usability, maintainability, flexibility,
and extendability) faster than work delivered by larger teams. The
challenge is to achieve a similar overall productivity effect with an
entire team and then with teams of teams.

Our team-based All-at-Once model was based on both the Japanese

approach to new product development, Sashimi, and Scrum. We were
already using production prototyping to build software. It was
implemented in slices (Sashimi) where an entire piece of fully
integrated functionality worked at the end of an iteration. What
intrigued us was Hirotaka Takeuchi and Hujiro Nonakas description of
the team-building process in setting up and managing a Scrum. The
idea of building a self-empowered team in which everyone had a global
view of the product on a daily basis seemed like the right idea. This
approach to managing the team, which had been so successful at

52

Honda, Canon, and Fujitsu, resonated with the systems thinking

approach being promoted by Peter Senge at MIT.

We were also impacted by recent publications in computer science. As

I alluded above, Peter Wagner at Brown University demonstrated that
it was impossible to fully specify or test an interactive system, which is
designed to respond to external inputs (Wegner's lemma). Here was
mathematical proof that any process that assumed known inputs, as
does the waterfall method, was doomed to failure when building an
object-oriented system.

We were prodded into setting up the first Scrum meeting after reading
James Coplien's paper on Borland's development of Quattro Pro for
Windows. The Quattro team delivered one million lines of C++ code in
31 months, with a four person staff growing to eight people later in the
project. This was about a thousand lines of deliverable code per person
per week, probably the most productive project ever documented. The
team attained this level of productivity by intensive interaction in daily
meetings with project management, product management, developers,
documenters, and quality assurance staff.

Software Evolution and Punctuated Equilibrium

Our daily meetings at Easel were disciplined in a way that we now
understand as the Scrum pattern. The most interesting effect of Scrum
on Easel's development environment was an observed "punctuated
equilibrium effect." A fully integrated component design environment
leads to rapid evolution of a software system with emergent, adaptive
properties, resembling the process of punctuated equilibrium observed
in biological species.

53

By having every member of the team see every day what every other
team member was doing, we began to see how we could accelerate
each other's work. For instance, one developer commented that if he
changed a few lines in code, he could eliminate days of work for
another developer. This effect was so dramatic that the project
accelerated to the point where it had to be slowed down. This
hyperproductive state was seen in several subsequent Scrums, but
never went so dramatic as the one at Easel.

Achieving a Sustainable HyperProductive State

The key to entering a hyperproductive state was not just the Scrum
organizational pattern. It was a combination of:

The skill of the team

The flexibility of a Smalltalk development environment
The implementation of what are now know as XP engineering
practices
The way we systematically stimulated production prototypes that
rapidly evolved into a deliverable product.

Furthermore, in the hyperproductive state, the initial Scrum entered

what professional athletes and martial artists call "the zone." No
matter what happened or what problems arose, the response of the
team always was far better than the response of any individual. It was
reminiscent of the Celtics basketball team at their peak, when they
could do no wrong. The impact of entering the zone was not just
hyperproductivity. Peoples personal lives were changed. Team
members said they would never forget working on the project, and
they would always be looking for another experience like it. It induced
open, team-oriented, fun-loving behavior in unexpected persons.
Those individuals who could not function well in an open,

54

hyperproductive environment self-selected themselves out of the team

by finding other jobs. This reinforced positive team behavior similar to
biological systems, which select for fitness to the environment,
resulting in improved performance of individual organisms.

Case 2: VMARK
The First Senior Management Scrum

When Easel Corporation was acquired by VMARK (subsequenctly

Informix, Ascension Software, and now IBM) the original Scrum team
continued its work on the same product. The VMARK senior
management team was intrigued by Scrum and asked Jeff Sutherland
to run a weekly senior management team Scrum to drive all the
companys products to the Internet.

These meetings started in 1995, and within a few months, the team
had caused the introduction of two new Internet products and
repositioned current products as Internet applications. Some members
of this team left VMARK to become innovators in emerging Internet
companies, so Scrum had an early impact on the Internet.
It was also at VMARK that Ken Schwaber was introduced to Scrum.
Ken and I had worked together on and off for years. I showed him
Scrum and he agreed it worked better than other project management
approaches and was similar to how he built project management
software in his company. He quickly sold off the project management
software business and worked on bringing Scrum to the software
industry at large. His work has had an incredible effect on deploying
Scrum worldwide.

Case 3: Individual, Inc.

55

The First Internet Scrum

In the spring of 1996, Jeff Sutherland returned to Individual, Inc., a
company he co-founded as VP of Engineering in 1988. Much of the
Scrum experience at Individual has been documented by Ken
Schwaber:

The most impressive thing to me about Scrum at Individual was not

that the team delivered two new Internet products and multiple
releases of one of the products in a single quarter. It was the fact
that Scrum eliminated several hours a day of senior management
meeting time starting the day that Scrum began, within a week of my
arrival at the company.

Because Individual had just gone public at the beginning of the

Internet explosion, there were multiple competing priorities and
constant revision of market strategy. As a result, the development
team was constantly changing priorities and unable to deliver product.
The management team was meeting daily to determine status of
priorities that were viewed differently by every manager. These
meetings were eliminated and the Scrum meetings became the focus
for all decision making.

It was incredibly productive to force all decisions to occur in the daily

Scrum meeting. If anyone wanted to know the status of specific
project deliverables or wanted to influence any priority, he or she
could only do it in the daily Scrum meeting. I remember the senior VP
of marketing sat in on every meeting for a couple of weeks sharing her
desperate concern about meeting Internet deliverables and timetables.
The effect on the team was not to immediately respond to her despair.
Over a period of two weeks, the team self- organized around a plan to

56

meet her priorities with achievable technical delivery dates. When she
agreed to the plan, she no longer had to attend any Scrum meetings.
The Scrum reported status on the Web with green lights, yellow lights,
and red lights for all pieces of functionality. In this way, the entire
company knew status in real time, all the time. This transparency of
information has become a key characteristic of Scrum.

Case 4: IDX Systems

The First Scrum in the Large

During the summer of 1996, IDX Systems hired Jeff Sutherland as

senior VP of engineering and product development. IDX had over
4,000 customers and was one of the largest US healthcare software
companies, with hundreds of developers working on dozens of
products. Here was an opportunity to extend Scrum to large-scale
development.

The approach at IDX was to turn the entire development group into
an interlocking set of Scrums. Every part of the organization was team
based including the management team, which included two vice
presidents, a senior architect, and several directors. Front-line Scrums
met daily. A Scrum of Scrums, which included the team leaders of
each Scrum in a product line, met weekly, The management Scrum
met monthly.

The key learning at IDX was that Scrum scales to any size. With
dozens of teams in operation, the most difficult problem was ensuring
the quality of the Scrum process in each team, particularly when the
entire organization had to learn Scrum all at once. IDX was large
enough to bring in productivity experts to monitor throughput on every

57

project. While most teams were only able to double the industry
average in function points per month delivered, several teams moved
into a hyperproductive state, producing deliverable functionality at four
to five times the industry average. These teams became shining stars
in the organization and examples for the rest of the organization to
follow.

One of the most productive teams at IDX was the Web Framework
team that built a web front-end infrastructure for all products. The
infrastructure was designed to host all IDX applications, as well as
seamlessly interoperate with end user or third party applications. It
was a distributed team with developers in Boston, Seattle, and
Vermont who met by teleconference in a daily Scrum meeting. The
geographic transparency of this model produced the same high
performance as co-located teams and has become the signature of
hyperproductive distributed/outsourced Scrums.

The innovation and quality of this teams work continued to be

demonstrated ten years later when IDX was acquired by GE Healthcare.
The web framework was selected as the standard for GE applications.

Case 5: PatientKeeper
The First Scrum Company

In early 2000, Jeff Sutherland joined PatientKeeper, Inc. as chief

technology officer and began introducing Scrum into a startup
company. He was the 21st employee, and the development team grew
from a dozen people to 45 people in six months. PatientKeeper
deploys mobile devices in healthcare institutions to capture and
process financial and clinical data. Server technology synchronizes the

58

mobile devices and moves data to and from multiple back-end legacy
systems. A robust technical architecture provides enterprise
application integration to hospital and clinical systems. Data is
forward-deployed from these systems in a PatientKeeper clinical
repository. Server technologies migrate changes from our clinical
repository to a cache and then to data storage on the mobile device.
PatientKeeper proves that Scrum works equally well across technology
implementations.

The key learning at PatientKeeper involved the introduction of eXtreme

Programming techniques as a way to implement code delivered by a
Scrum organization. While all teams seem to find it easy to implement
a Scrum organizational process, they do not always find it easy to
introduce XP. We were able to do some team programming and
constant testing and refactoring, particularly as we migrated all
development to Java and XML. It was more difficult to introduce these
ideas when developers were working in C & C++. After a year of
Scrum meetings in all areas of development, processes matured
enough to capitalize on Scrum project management techniques, which
were fully automated.

Complete automation and transparency of data allowed PatientKeeper

to multithread Sprints through multiple teams. That in combination
with implementing a MetaScrum of senior stakeholders in the company
allowed PatientKeeper to run from top to bottom as a Scrum and
become the first Scrum company to enter the hyperproductive state,
delivering over 45 production releases a year of a large enterprise
software platform. This became the prototype for the All-at-Once, or
Type C Scrum, implemented in at least five companies by 2006.

59

PatientKeeper was the first company to achieve a hyperproductive

revenue state driven by Scrum in 2007. Revenue quadrupled from 13M
to 50M in one year.

60

Other Prominent Projects

One of the most interesting things about Scrum is the unique case
studies that have been published at IEEE conferences. Scrum is used
by some of the most productive, high maturity, and most profitable
software development teams in the world. Scrum powers:
The most productive large development project ever documented (see
next chapter).

The most unique CMMI Level 5 implementation on the planet.

The most profitable software development project in the history of
software development.

Systematic Software Engineering a unique CMMI Level 5

implementation
Systematic Software Engineering in Aarhus, Denmark, spent seven
years and over 100,000 person hours of process engineers to achieve
CMMI Level 5 certification, reduce rework by 80%, and improve
productivity by 31%. Within six months after a Scrum Certification
course they had reduced planning time by 80%, defects by 40%, total
cost of a project by 50% while simultaneously enhancing customer and
employee satisfaction. They now bid Scrum projects at 50% of the
cost of waterfall projects.

61

Google AdWords the

Results From a Scrum Project at Yahoo!
most profitable How does Scrum work, compared to the
development project in approach which was used previously at the
company?
history
Productivity: 68% of respondents reported
Scrum is better or much better (4 or 5 on a 5-
One of the most interesting point scale); 5% reported Scrum is worse or
much worse (1 or 2 on a 5-point scale); 27%
Scrum projects is Googles
reported Scrum is about the same (3 on a 5-
AdWords implementations. point scale).
This application drives the Team Morale: 52% of respondents reported
Scrum is better or much better; 9% reported
majority of Google revenue
Scrum is worse or much worse; 39% reported
growth and helps create Scrum is about the same.
market capitalization that is Adaptability: 63% of respondents reported
Scrum is better or much better; 4% reported
higher than Intel and just
Scrum is worse or much worse; 33% reported
below that of Chevron, the Scrum is about the same.
most profitable oil company Accountability: 62% of respondents reported
Scrum is better or much better; 6% reported
in the world. The AdWords
Scrum is worse or much worse; 32% reported
project, powered by Scrum, Scrum is about the same.
has distributed teams in five Collaboration and Cooperation: 81% of
respondents reported Scrum is better or much
locations and interfaces with
better; 1% reported Scrum is worse or much
virtually all Google products worse; 18% reported Scrum is about the
on every release. As a result, same.
Team Productivity: Increased on average
the Google project manager by 37%, based on the estimates of the
needed to insert more Product Owners.
structure than is usually Buy In: 86% of team-members stated that they
would continue using Scrum if the decision were
associated with Google solely up to them.
teams. His seamless
introduction of Scrum based (Based on a quarterly survey 2007,
including everyone at Yahoo! using Scrum,
on resolving the highest i.e. Product Owners, Team Members, Scrum
priority impediments Masters, and the functional managers of
observed by the teams those individuals.)

resulted in an

62

implementation that no longer needed a Scrum Master to function. The

teams ran by themselves.

Chapter Five

The SirsiDynix case

This case study summarizes an extraordinary distributed

project that ran smoothly across ten time zones.

It may seem improbable, but during the most productive Java project
ever documented, the 56 developers from SirsiDynix and StarSoft
Development Laboratories had an ocean and half a continent between
them. Working from Provo in Utah, Waterloo in Canada and St.
Petersburg in Russia, the distributed team delivered 671,688 lines of
production Java code during 2005. In total, the Java application
consisted of over 1,000,000 lines of code. This proves that a large,
distributed, outsourced team actually can achieve a hyperproductive
state in this case 15.3 function points per developer & month.
Best practices for distributed Scrum seen on this project consisted of:
daily Scrum team meetings of all developers from multiple sites
daily meetings of the Product Owner team hourly automated builds
from one central repository no distinction between developers at
different sites on the same team seamless integration of XP practices
like pair programming with Scrum

The Companies

63

SirsiDynix has approximately 4,000 library and consortia clients,

serving over 200 million people through over 20,000 library outlets in
the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Jack
Blount, President and CEO of Dynix and now CTO of the merged
SirsiDynix company, negotiated an outsource agreement with StarSoft
who staffed the project with over 20 qualified engineers in 60 days.
Significant development milestones were completed in a few weeks
and joint development projects are efficiently tracked and continue to
be on schedule.

StarSoft Development Labs, Inc. is a software outsourcing service

provider in Russia and Eastern Europe. Headquartered in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA, StarSoft operates development centers in St.
Petersburg, Russia and Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, employing over 450
professionals. StarSoft has experience handling development efforts
varying in size and duration from just several engineers working for a
few months to large-scale projects involving dozens of developers and
spanning several years. StarSoft successfully uses Agile development
and particularly XP engineering practices to maintain CMMI Level 3
certification and was acquired by Exigen Services in 2007.

A Huge Task at Hand

SirsiDynix was confronted with the requirement to completely re-

implement a legacy library system with over 12,500 installed sites.
Large teams working over many years in a changing business
environment faced many new requirements in the middle of the
project. To complicate matters further, the library software industry
was in a consolidating phase. Dynix started the project in 2002 and
merged with Sirsi in 2005 to form SirsiDynix.

64

Fortunately, Dynix started with a scalable Agile process that could

adapt to changing requirements throughout the project. Time to
market demanded more than doubling of output. That could only
happen by augmenting resources with Agile teams. StarSoft was
selected because of their history of successful XP implementations and
their experience with systems level software.

The combination of high risk, large scale, changing market

requirements, merger and acquisition business factors, and the
SirsiDynix experience with Scrum combined with StarSoft success with
XP led them to choose an Integrated Scrums implementation. Jack
Blount's past experience with Agile development projects at US Data
Authority, TeleComputing and JD Edwards where he had used Isolated
Scrums and Distributed Scrum of Scrums models did not meet his
expectations. This was a key factor in his decision to structure the
project as Integrated Scrums.

The Systems and Software Consortium (SSCI) has outlined drivers,

constraints, and enablers that force organizations to invest in real-time
project management information systems. Scalable Scrum
implementations with minimal tooling are one of the best real-time
information generators in the software industry.

SSCI complexity drivers are described as:

Increasing problem complexity shifting focus from

requirements to objective capabilities that must be met by larger
teams and strategic partnerships.
Increasing solution complexity, which shifts attention from
platform architectures to enterprise architectures and fully
integrated systems.

65

Increasing technical complexity from integrating standalone

systems to integrating across layers and stacks of
communications and network architectures.
Increasing compliance complexity shifting from proprietary to
open standards.
Increasing team complexity shifting from a single implementer
to strategic teaming and mergers and acquisitions.

SirsiDynix faced all of these issues. Legacy products were difficult to

sell to new customers. They needed a new product with complete
functionality for the library enterprise based on new technologies that
were highly scalable, easily expandable, and used the latest computer
and library standards,

Top Issues in Distributed Development

The SSCI has carefully researched top issues in distributed
development, all of which had to be handled by SirsiDynix and
StarSoft.

Strategic: Difficulty leveraging available resources, best

practices are often deemed proprietary, are time consuming and
difficult to maintain.
Project and process management: Difficulty synchronizing
work between distributed sites.
Communication: Lack of effective communication mechanisms.
Cultural: Conflicting behaviors, processes, and technologies.
Technical: Incompatible data formats, schemas, and standards.
Security: Ensuring electronic transmission confidentiality and
privacy.

66

The unique way in which SirsiDynix and StarSoft implemented an

Integrated Scrums model carefully addressed all of these issues.

Solution: Integrated Scrums

SirsiDynix used the three scrum roles Scrum Master, Product Owner
& Team to solve the strategic distribution problem of building a high
velocity, real-time reporting organization with an open source process
that is easy to implement and low-overhead to maintain.
For large programs, a Chief ScrumMaster to run a Scrum of
Scrums and a Chief Product Owner to centrally manage a single
consolidated and prioritized product backlog is essential. SirsiDynix
located the Scrum of Scrums and the Product Owner teams in Utah.

Team Formation

The second major challenge for large projects is process management,

particularly synchronizing work between sites. This was achieved by
splitting teams across sites and fine tuning daily Scrum meetings.
Teams at SirsiDynix were split across the functional areas needed
for an integrated library system. Half of a Scrum team is typically in
Provo, Utah, and the other half in St. Petersburg. There are usually 3-
5 people on the Utah part of the team and 4 or more on the St.
Petersburg portion of the team. The Search and Reporting Teams are
smaller. There are smaller numbers of team members in Seattle,
Denver, St. Louis, and Waterloo, Canada.

Scrum Meetings

Teams meet across geographies at 7:45am Utah time which is 17:45

St. Petersburg time. Teams found it necessary to distribute answers to

67

the three Scrum questions in writing before the Scrum meeting. This
shortens the time needed for the join meeting teleconference and
helps overcome any language barriers. Each individual reports on what
they did since the last meeting, what they intend to do next, and what
impediments are blocking their progress.

Email exchange on the three questions before the daily Scrum

teleconference was used throughout the project to enable phone
meetings to proceed more smoothly and efficiently. These daily team
calls helped the people in Russia and the U.S. learn to understand
each other. In contrast, most outsourced development projects do not
hold formal daily calls and the communication bridge is never formed.
Local sub-teams have an additional standup meeting at the beginning
of the day in St. Petersburg. Everyone uses the same process and
technologies and daily meetings coordinate activities within the teams.

Scrum Masters are all in Provo, Utah or Waterloo, Canada, and

met in a Scrum of Scrums every Monday morning. Here work is
coordinated across teams. Architects are directly allocated to
production Scrum teams and all located in Utah. An Architecture group
also meets on Monday after the Scrum of Scrums meeting and controls
the direction of the project architecture through the Scrum meetings.
A Product Owner resident in Utah is assigned to each Scrum team. A
chief Product Owner meets regularly with all Product Owners to assure
coordination of requirements.

SirsiDynix achieved strong central control of teams across geographies

by centrally locating Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Architects.
This helped them get consistent performance across distributed teams.

68

Sprints

Sprints are two weeks long on the SirsiDynix project. There is a Sprint
planning meeting similar to an XP release planning meeting in which
requirements from User Stories are broken down into development
tasks. Most tasks require a lot of questions from the Product Owners
and some tasks take more time than initial estimates.

The lag time for Utah Product Owner response to questions on User
Stories forces multitasking in St. Petersburg and this is not an ideal
situation. Sometimes new tasks are discovered after querying Product
Owners during the Sprint about feature details.

Code is feature complete and demoed at the end of each Sprint.

Up until 2006, if it met the Product Owners functional requirement, it
was considered done, although full testing was not completed. It was
not deliverable code until SirsiDynix strengthened its definition of
done to include all testing in 2006. Allowing work in progress to
cross Sprint boundaries introduces wait times and greater risk into the
project. It violates the lean principle of reducing work in progress and
increases rework.

Product Specifications
Requirements are in the form of User Stories used in many Scrum and
XP implementations. Some of them are lengthy and detailed, others
are not. A lot of questions result after receiving the document in St.
Petersburg which are resolved by daily Scrum meetings, instant
messaging, or email.

For this project, St. Petersburg staff like a detailed description because
the system is a comprehensive and complex system designed for

69

specialized librarians. As a result, there is a lot of knowledge that

needs to be embedded in the product specification.

The ways libraries work in St. Petersburg are very different than
English libraries. Russian libraries operate largely via manual
operations. While processes look similar to English libraries on the
surface, the underlying details are quite different. Therefore, user
stories do not have sufficient detail for Russian programmers.

70

if it
<cr>.

71







Testing
Developers write unit tests. The Test team and Product Owners do
manual testing. An Automation Test team in Utah creates scripts for
an automated testing tool. Stress testing is as needed.

During the Sprint, the Product Owner tests features that are in the
Sprint backlog. Up until 2006, testers received a stable Sprint build
only after the Sprint demo. The reason for this was a lower tester/
developer ratio than recommended by the Scrum Alliance.

There are 30 team members in North America and 26 team members

in St. Petersburg on this project. The St. Petersburg team has one
project leader, 3 technical team leaders, 18 developers, 1 test lead,
and 3 testers. This low tester/developer ratio initially made it
impossible to have a fully tested package of code at the end of the
Sprints.

The test-first approach was initially encouraged and not mandated.

Tests were written simultaneously with code most of the time. GUIs
were not unit tested.

Functional Test Example:

Functional Area Reserve Book Room

Check that items from Item List is placed under Reserve with Inactive
Task Description
status

1. User has right to place Items under Reserve

Condition 2.At least one Item List exists in the system
3. Default Reserve Item Status in Session Defaults is set to Inactive

72

Entry Point Launcher is opened

Test Data No specific data

1. Reserve > Reserve Item
2. Select Item Search icon
3. Select Item List in the Combo box list of search options and enter
Action appropriate Item list name
4. Press Enter
5. Select all Items which appear in the Item Search combo box and press
OK

1. Items that were in Item list should appear in the list in Reserve Item
2. Status of all items that has been just added should be shown as
Expected Results Inactive
3. Save button should be inactive
4. All corresponding Items should retain their original parameters

In the summer of 2006, a new CTO of SirsiDynix, Talin Bingham, took

over the project and introduced Test Driven Design. Every Sprint starts
with the usual Sprint Planning meeting and teams are responsible for
writing functional tests before doing any coding. Once functional tests
are written and reviewed, coding starts. Test-first coding is mandated.

When coding is complete, developers run unit tests and manually pass
all the functional tests before checking in changes to the repository.
Automation testing is done using the Compuware TestPartner tool,
but there is still room for improvement of test coverage.

Configuration Management

SirsiDynix was using CVS as source code repository when the decision
was made to engage an outsourcing firm. At that time, SirsiDynix
made a decision that CVS could not be used effectively because of lack
of support for distributed development, largely seen in long code

73

synchronization times. Other tools were evaluated and Perforce was

chosen as the best solution.

StarSoft had seen positive results on many projects using Perforce.

It is fast, reliable and offers local proxy servers for distributed teams.
Although not a cheap solution, it has been very effective for the
SirsiDynix project.

Automated builds run every hour with email generated back to

developers. It takes 12 minutes to do a build, 30 minutes if the
database changes. StarSoft would like to see faster builds and true
concurrent engineering. Right now builds are only stable every two
weeks at Sprint boundaries.

Pair Programming, Refactoring, and Other XP Practices

StarSoft is an XP company and tries to introduce XP practices into all
their projects. Pair programming is done on more complicated pieces
of functionality. Refactoring was planned for future Sprints and not
done in every iteration as in XP. Some radical refactoring without loss
of functionality occurred as the project approached completion.
Continuous integration is implemented as hourly builds.

On this project, these three engineering practices were used with

Scrum as the primary project management methodology.

Measuring Progress
The project uses the Jira issue tracking and project management
software. This gives everyone on the project a real-time view into the
state of Sprints. It also provides comprehensive management
reporting tools.

74

Data from Jira can be downloaded into Excel to create any requested
data analysis. High velocity projects need an automated tool to track
status across teams and geographies. The best tools support bug
tracking and status of development tasks in one system and avoid
extra work on data entry by developers. Such tools should track tasks
completed by developers and work remaining. They provide more
detailed and useful data than time sheets, which should be avoided.
Time sheets are extra overhead that do not provide useful information
on the state of the project, and are de-motivating to developers.

75

Resulting Context with Integrated Scrums

Collaboration of SirsiDynix and StarSoft turned the Horizon 8.0 project
into one of the most productive Scrum projects ever documented. For
example, data is provide in the table below on a project that was done
initially with a waterfall team and then re- implemented with a Scrum
team. The waterfall team took 9 months with 60 people and generated
54000 lines of code. It was re- implemented by a Scrum team of 4.5
people in 12 months. The resulting 50,803 lines of code had more
functionality and higher quality.

Scrum Waterfall SirsiDynix

Person Months 54 540 827
Java LOC 50.083 54000 671.688
Function Points 959 900 12673
FP per dev/ 17.8 2.0 15.3
month

Capers Jones of Software Productivity Research has published

extensive tables on average number of function points per lines of
code for all major languages. Since the average lines of code per
function point for Java is 53, we can estimate the number of function
points in the Scrum application. The waterfall implementation is
known to have fewer function points.

Distributed teams working on Horizon 8.0 generated 671,688 lines

of code in 14.5 months with 56 people. During this period they
radically refactored the code on two occasions and reduced the code
base by 275,000. They have not been penalized for refactoring as
that is rarely done in large waterfall projects in the database from

76

which Capers derived his numbers. They have also not been
rewarded for refactoring even though reducing lines of code is viewed
as important as adding new code on well-run Agile projects.

Jones has also shown from his database of tens of thousands of

projects that industry average productivity is 12.5 function points per
developer/month for a project of 900 function points and that this
drops to 3 for a project with 13000 function points. Some of this is
due to 4GL and other code-automation tools used on small projects,
many of which are not implemented in third generation languages
like Java.

The SirsiDynix project is almost as productive as the small Scrum

project with a collocated team of 4.5 people. For a globally dispersed
team, it is one of the most productive projects ever documented at a
run rate of five times industry average.

77

CHAPTER 6

Can Scrum projects fail?

Lets face it: although the success rate is astonishingly high,
scrum projects sometimes fail most often due to poor
leadership.

Scrum can be seen as a framework for

continuous process improvement.
Harvard Professor John Kotter notes that
70% of change processes fail, primarily
due to a lack of sense of urgency among
the leadership.

Scrum is very resilient with a success rate of over 70% according to

the latest worldwide survey of over 2000 companies (Version One
survey). Yet it is not a silver bullet and leadership failure is the
primary cause of Scrum failure. Lets look at two examples.

Case Study 1: EmbeddedWaterFall.com

- Roman Pichler of Pichler Consulting Ltd., London

At a development organization specializing in embedded

communications products, the head of development was determined to
implement Scrum in order to get faster delivery, higher quality from
software teams. Lets call this company EmbeddedWaterFall.com. A
pilot project to create a new software system was selected. Success
would strongly influence the future of the development organization.

78

Product management at EmbeddedWaterFall.com was skeptical about

Agile processes. Three Scrum teams created an architectural
baseline/internal release in six months of two-week iterations which
included deployment. Developers embraced Agile practices well, the
head of development was pleased with results, and product
management liked the transparency of reporting. The Human Resource
department was encouraged to align performance appraisals with agile
practice as it is fun, a challenge, and a positive change.

Then impediments begin to appear. Scaling to eight teams is difficult.

Velocity of software delivery is lower than expected. Re- organization
at headquarters leads to loss of support for Agile practice from product
management. The head of development now insists that date and
scope must be met. Command and control with task-based planning is
implemented along with overtime and weekend work. Most agile
development practices are abandoned. EmbeddedWaterFall.com
reverted to type.

There was an extensive analysis of root causes and lessons learned on

this project. The bottom line is failure of management to understand
agile practice and failure of management commitment to implement
Scrum made it impossible to remove impediments at the first sign of
trouble.

Case Study 2: GameOver.now

by Henrik Kniberg of Crisp SA, Stockholm

A second case study shows how aggressive action can resolve

management challenges when management is willing to adapt

79

and remove impediments to Scrum implementation. Lets call this

company GameOver.now where Scrum was implemented for the
most important project in the company to deliver a critical
software application on a fixed date in April of 2007.

A Scrum team ran two-week sprints from April to September in

2006 to produce detailed requirements. Then they ran two-week
sprints to code the requirements from October to December.
January through March of 2007 was reserved for testing.

In January the code is not complete, testing has not begun, and
the management is hovering over the team worried about
progress. They call in an expert Scrum trainer who notices the
team is not really a team. The DBA works independently on her
set of tasks. A three person subgroup in the team mistrusts
everyone else. Management is starting to micromanage an
impending disaster. Waterfall has been implemented under a
Scrum banner.

The Scrum trainer says it is time to implement Scrum. We will

create a product backlog, estimate the product backlog, find the
actual velocity of the team by running two sprints, and determine
the release date by building a roadmap. Created and estimating
stories using Planning Poker for incomplete product backlog
showed that 180 points were remaining. There were 70 points of
testing remaining for the portion of the backlog that had been
coded. The team completed two sprints with a velocity of 10. At
currentcapacity, the project would take 25 two-week sprints and
be delivered a year late.

In order to improve the date, the size of the backlog needs to be

80

reduced and the velocity needs to be increased. However, the

root cause of the current problem is management lack of focus. A
companywide meeting is held and the top priority project is
clearly explained to the entire staff. They are told not to disrupt
the team, to help them whenever they can, and that this project
is really the top priority for the company.

The team systematically removes impediments and triples their

velocity to 30 points per sprint. They deliver an early release to
the customer in the same quarter as the original schedule. The
customer is both surprised and happy. They deliver a final
incremental release during the next quarter. While the project
was several months late, it was six months earlier than the
waterfall Scrum would have delivered it.

The lesson here is that even a failed project can be rescued at

the eleventh hour by Scrum if management and the team will
actually implement Scrum.

81

Appendix 1

Whos Who in Scrum?

This is a list of people, organisations and teams who have inspired, informed and
instructed Jeff Sutherland and his colleagues. Hence, they have all contributed to the
creation of Scrum in their own special manner.

Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, the Godfathers of Scrum,

unknowingly gave Scrum its name and helped create a global
transformation of software development. The New New Product
Development Game. Harvard Business Review, (January-February
1986)

Jim Coplien and the ATT Bell Labs Pasteur Project wrote the paper
on the most productive software development team ever documented
the Borland Quattro Pro Project. The first Scrum team implemented
the Scrum daily meeting after reading this paper.

Alan Kay and his team at Xerox Parc invented Smalltalk, the mouse,
the graphical user interface, the personal computer, the Ethernet, and
the laser printer. Listening to his insights on innovation inspired the
first Scrum team to go from good to great.

Professor Rodney Brooks launched the startup now known as iRobot

in space leased from Jeff Sutherland. He taught the subsumption
architecture, how to create simple rules to produce highly intelligent
performance from complex adaptive systems.

Christopher Langton of Los Alamos Labs and the Sante Fe Institute

coined the term artificial life and showing that increasing degrees of

82

freedom up to the edge of chaotic behavior accelerated their evolution.

Scrum feels chaotic by intent, so as to accelerate software evolution.

The French object-database developers working near the MIT campus

at Graphael (later Object Databases, then Matisse Software) were the
first to demonstrate in Lisp and then in C++ the Agile patterns of pair
programming, radical refactoring, continuous integration, common
ownership of code, world class user interface design, and other tips
and tricks which Kent Bent used to createeXtreme Programming a
decade later. These were all incorporated into the first Scrum.

The Creative Initiative Foundation worked with Silicon Valley

volunteers to help make the world a better place, the underlying
motivation driving the founders of Scrum. This connected the Co-
Creators of Scrum with the early systems thinking of MIT Professor
Peter Senge who later wrote The Fifth Discipline.

Capers Jones and his productivity experts at Software Productivity

Research analyzed and reanalyzed the output of early Scrum teams,
as well as many of the software products built with Scrum during
1994-2000. These analyses allowed the first Scrum team to provide a
money-back guarantee that users would double productivity during the
first month using tools created by the first Scrum.

The first Scrum team John Scumniotales (ScrumMaster), Don

Roedner (Product Owner), Jeff McKenna (Senior Consultant), Joe
Kinsella (object-relational mapping), Laurel Ginder (QA), and three
Danish developers - Grzegorz Ciepiel, Bent Illum, and John
Lindgreen. They endured repeated failure, depressing analysis of
these failures in front of their technical peers from other companies,
and transcendence of their missteps. They were the first Scrum team

83

to achieve the hyperproductive state for which Scrum was designed

and their product, Object Studio, was reported as industry leader by
computer trade journals. Little did they know that Scrum would be
their greatest contribution.

PatientKeeper Inc., the first company to fully implement an All at

Once or Type C Scrum involving the entire company in Scrum practice.
This innovation in process design was documented by Mary and Tom
Poppendieck in their book Lean Software Development. I find that
the vast majority of organizations are still trying to do too much stuff,
and thus find themselves thrashing. The only organization I know of
which has really solved this is Patient Keeper.

Christopher Alexander coined the phrase quality without a name

(QWAN) something that many Scrum practitioners experience. The
phrase was used in the book The Timeless Way of Building, where
Alexander describes a certain quality that we seek, but which cannot
be named. This may be the most important feature of Scrum and can
only be spoken of as a set of core values - openness, focus,
commitment, courage, and respect. It could be viewed as the speed
of trust or one of the sources of ba often seen on Scrum teams. Ba
is the Japanese term for the creative flow of innovation described by
Takeuchi and Nonaka.

84

Appendix 2

References
ForacompletelistofJeffSutherlandpapers,pleasevisit http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/

C. Jakobsen and J. Sutherland, Scrum and CMMI Going from Good

to Great: are you ready-ready to be done-done?, in Agile 2009,
Chicago, 2009.

K. Schwaber and J. Sutherland. The Scrum Guide. Scrum.org, 2010.

A. Sutherland, J. Sutherland, and C. Hegarty, Scrum in Church:

Saving the World One Team at a Time, in Agile 2009, Chicago, 2009.

J. Sutherland, Future of Scrum: Parallel Pipelining of Sprints in

Complex Projects, in AGILE 2005 Conference Denver, CO: IEEE, 2005.

J. Sutherland and I. Altman, Organizational Transformation with

Scrum: How a Venture Capital Group Gets Twice as Much Done with
Half the Work, in 43rd Hawaii International Conference on Software
Systems, Kauai, Hawaii, 2010.

J. Sutherland, S. Downey, and B. Granvik, Shock Therapy: A

Bootstrap for a Hyper- Productive Scrum in Agile 2009, Chicago, 2009.

J. Sutherland, G. Schoonheim, and M. Rijk, Fully Distributed Scrum:

The Secret Sauce for Hyperproductive Offshored Development Teams,
in Agile 2008, Toronto, 2008.

J. Sutherland and K. Schwaber, The Scrum Papers: Nuts, Bolts, and

Origins of an Agile Method. Boston: Scrum, Inc., 2007.

J. Sutherland, A. Viktorov, J. Blount, and N. Puntikov, Distributed

Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development
Teams, in HICSS'40, Hawaii International Conference on Software
Systems Big Island, Hawaii: IEEE, 2007.

85

Takeuchi and I. Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game,

Harvard Business Review, 1986.

86