Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development Teams

Recently, I had to complete a research paper on distributed programming for the Agile 2006 Conference in a two day weekend. Russian XP expert and project leader, Anton Viktorov, flew into Boston from St. Petersburg to help write up the SirsiDynix project. Over 1,000,000 lines of code were written in record time by a set of Java teams distributed across Utah, Colorado, Canada and Russia.

StarSoft Development Labs, the leading XP shop in Russia, was selected as a partner by Scrum company, SirsiDynix, to replace a large library system installed at over 12,500 sites worldwide. CTO Jack Blount, formerly COO of Borland, ran the project as a distributed Scrum of Scrums with individual teams distributed across geographies. Anton had been pair programming for years at StarSoft Labs with little experience writing research papers. I had over 20 years experience writing research papers and 13 years of Scrum. We decided we better pair write the paper to meet our two day deadline in the middle of a Boston blizzard. I did most of the coding as he framed the details of the project. The SirsiDynix/StarSoft 56-person distributed Java team was as productive as a 6 person colocated team using Scrum. Unbelievable! Needless to say, we wrote the research paper in record time and you can judge the result for yourself. See:

Sutherland, J., Viktorov, A., Blount, J., and Puntikov, N. (2006) Distributed Scrum: Agile Project Management with Outsourced Development Teams. Submitted to HICSS40, Big Island, Hawaii, Jan 2007.