Agile 2008: Secret Sauce for Distributed Scrum

Guido Schoonheim, CTO of Xebia, presented a case study with me at Agile 2008 on how to get maximum productivity and quality out of a distributed Scrum. The solution shows how to create distributed velocity = local velocity, distributed quality = local quality, and scaling is linear. Add resources to a project and productivity per developer stays the same, something seen only in two previous case studies I co-authored. This is counter-intuitive and requires secret sauce to achieve.

Taks a look at Guido's blog where you can find the following and more:

Agile 2008

At Agile2008 in Toronto Jeff Sutherland and myself presented our article outlining how to achieve hyperproductivity in distributed Scrum when working in an offshore situation. InfoQ recorded our presentation and will publish it online in November as the end of a series of Agile2008 talks.

Download article Download presentation

Also see this InfoQ article

Agile and Offshoring, oil and water?

If you are reading the Xebia blog chances are that you are already familiar with the benefits of Agile development. Practicing Agile (in our case Scrum combined with XP) delivers hyperproductivity combined with very high quality. The promise of offshoring in the modern IT industry is also clear: more available talent, scaling up and down without local layoffs or knowledge drain, and of course cost reduction. Together they make a killer combo!

However, Agile and offshoring seem like oil and water, they don't seem to mix. How to get a focus on individuals and interactions when your people are distributed across the globe? What is the secret sauce to use to get it running smoothly?