Agile Project Management

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...