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Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development
Teams
Jeff Sutherland, Ph.D.
Patientkeeper
Newton, MA, US
Anton Viktorov
StarSoft Dev. Labs
St. Petersburg, Russia
jeff.sutherland@computer.org
anton.viktorov@starsoftlabs.com
Abstract
Agile project management with Scrum derives from
best business practices in companies like Fuji-Xerox,
Honda, Canon, and Toyota. Toyota routinely achieves
four times the productivity and 12 times the quality of
competitors. Can Scrum do the same for globally
distributed teams? Two Agile companies, SirsiDynix and
StarSoft Development Laboratories achieved comparable
performance developing a Java application with over
1,000,000 lines of code. During 2005, a distributed team
of 56 Scrum developers working from Provo, Utah;
Waterloo, Canada; and St. Petersburg, Russia, delivered
671,688 lines of production Java code. At 15.3 function
points per developer/month, this is the most productive
Java project ever documented. SirsiDynix best practices
are similar to those observed on distributed Scrum teams
at IDX Systems, radically different than those promoted
by PMBOK, and counterintuitive to practices advocated
by the Scrum Alliance. This paper analyzes and
recommends best practices for globally distributed Agile
teams.
1. Introduction
Scrum is an Agile software development process
designed to add energy, focus, clarity, and transparency to
project teams developing software systems. It leverages
artificial life research [1] by allowing teams to operate
close to the edge of chaos to foster rapid system
evolution. It capitalizes on robot subsumption
architectures [2] by enforcing a simple set of rules that
allows rapid self-organization of software teams to
produce systems with evolving architectures. A properly
implemented Scrum was designed to increase speed of
development, align...