Managing Offshore Software Projects

Verma, Vikas (2008) Managing Offshore Software Projects. Icfai University Press.

A new book republished the Scrum case study on the highest performing large project ever recorded.

Sutherland, J, Viktorov, A., and Blount, J. (2006) Adaptive Engineering of Large Software Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Complex Systems, Boston, MA, 25-30 June.

This project distributed Scrum teams so that half of each team was in the United States at SirsiDynix and the other half of each team was at Exigen Services in St. Petersburg, Russia. It showed how to set up distributed/outsourced teams to achieve both linear scalability of teams on a large project and distributed velocity of each team the same as the velocity of a small colocated team.

This project is still generating controversy in the Agile community by showing that you can run distributed high performance Scrums. There were quality problems on this project that caused some in the Agile community to discount the remarkable results and argue that it could not be repeated successfully.

However, Xebia in the Netherlands has now repeated the fully distributed model on a seried of projects using Scrum with a complete implementation of XP practices inside each Scrum team. Half of each team on all large projects is based in the Netherlands and the other half of each team is based in India. They achieve the same performance as the SirsiDynix project with extremely low defect rates. Their definition of done at the end of each Sprint is that the software has been successfully acceptance tested by the end user.

A paper on the Xebia experience has successfully passed the first phase of the review process for publication at Agile 2008 in Toronto.

Fully Distributed Scrum: The Secret Sauce for Hyperproductive Outsourced Development Teams. Jeff Sutherland, Ph.D., Guido Schoonheim, Eelco Rustenburg, Maurits Rijk.

ScrumMaster Certification in Los Angeles

20-21 May 2008, Beverly Hills, CA

Get certified by Jeff Sutherland, Co-Creator of Scrum and Scott Downey from MySpace.

This course will be led by Jeff Sutherland, Co-Creator of Scrum in downtown Beverly Hills near Rodeo Drive at The Tower - Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverwil Drive. Beverly Hills, CA 90025. Jeff has been a consultant to MySpace and Scott Downey, MySpace Scrum Evanglist will assist him with this training.

The course will start promptly at 9am each day and run until 5pm. Please arrive at 8:30 the first day for a continental breakfast. Participants should read Ken Schwaber's book, Agile Project Management with Scrum, or Jeff Sutherland's draft of The Scrum Papers before the class as we will assume you know the basics of Scrum.

Jeff Sutherland started the first Scrum at Easel Corporation in 1993. He worked with Ken Schwaber to emerge Scrum as a formal process at OOPSLA ’95. Together, they extended and enhanced Scrum at many software companies and IT organizations and helped write the Agile Manifesto.

Jeff is the CEO of Scrum, Inc. powered by OpenView Venture Partners and is Agile coach to over 20 portfolio companies and to the OpenView venture group staff which runs all its operations with Scrum. As Senior Advisor to OpenView and CTO of PatientKeeper he focuses on using Scrum to transform companies as well as empower software developers. PatientKeeper quadrupled revenue in 2007 and the OpenView venture capital group is using it to create similar high performance portfolio companies. Jeff will share the secret sauce that helps development teams radically improve productivity and quality while providing a more rewarding and fun working environment for developers.

You can learn from Jeff's experience as a consultant to the world's leading software companies. Their experience can help make your Scrum implementation world class. There has been lot's of learning with Jeff at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, MySpace, Adobe, GE, Siemens, BellSouth, GSI Commerce, Ulticom, Palm, St. Jude Medical, DigiChart, RosettaStone, Healthwise, Sony/Ericson, Accenture, Trifork, Systematic Software Engineering, Exigen Services, SirsiDynix, Softhouse, Philips Medical, Barclays Global Investors, Constant Contact, Wellogic, Inova Solutions, Medco, Saxo Bank, Xebia, Insight.com, SolutionsIQ, Crisp, Johns Hopkins Applie Physics Laboratory, Motley Fool, Planon, OpenView Venture Partners, Juske Bank, BEC, Camp Scrum, DotWay AB, Ultimate Software, Danube, Rally Development, Version One, and many other companies.

Jeff is an expert on distributed/outsourced Scrum (see Agile 2008) and on implementing Scrum in a CMMI Level 5 company. He has has scaled and distributed Scrum using his last five companies as laboratories. His entire current company at PatientKeeper is run by a MetaScrum, and is one of the most advance implementions of Scrum worldwide. Mary Poppendieck, in her latest book on Lean Software Development, comments: Five years ago a killer application emerged in the health care industry: Give doctors access to patient information on a PDA. Today there is no question which company won the race to dominate this exploding market; PatientKeeper has overwhelmed its competition with its capability to bring new products and features to market just about every week. The sixty or so technical people produce more software than many organizations several times larger, and they do not show any sign that the size of their code base is slowing them down.

A key strategy that has kept PatientKeeper at the front of the pack is an emphasis on unprecedented speed in delivering new features. It will not surprise anyone who understands Lean that PatientKeeper has to maintain superb quality in order to support its rapid delivery. CTO Jeff Sutherland explains it this way:

“Rapid cycle time:

* Increases learning tremendously
* Eliminates buggy software because you die if you don't fix this.
* Fixes the install process because you die if you have to install 45 releases this year and install is not easy.
* Improves the upgrade process because there is a constant flow of upgrades that are mandatory. Makes upgrades easy.
* Forces quick standardization of software via new features rather than customization and one off.
* Forces implementation of sustainable pace. You die a death of attrition without it.
* Allows waiting to build new functionality until there are 4-5 customers who pay for it. This is counterintuitive, and caused by the fact everything is ready within 90 days.”

"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 PatientKeeper." Mary Poppendieck

In this course, participants will learn how to stop thrashing and start executing along with everything necessary for getting started with Scrum. There are very few rules to Scrum so it is important to learn its fundamental principles by experiencing them directly from those who have implemented the best Scrums in the software industry. Participants gain hands-on practice with the release backlog, sprint backlog, the daily Scrum meeting, tracking progress with a burndown chart, and more. Participants experience the Scrum process through a “59-minute Scrum” and the "XP Game” which simulate Scrum projects through non-technical group exercises.

The course will run from 9am-5pm each day.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional Certified ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.

PMPs:
You can receive 16 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for this course.
Course Material:

Participants will receive course materials for review upon registration. Click here for course syllabus.

The CSM course was formulated to train and certify ScrumMasters and is used worldwide for ScrumMaster training. The book, Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber is required reading for the course and the course is based on the primary Scrum book, Agile Development with Scrum.

Of course, there will be updated material and training exercises in the course which you cannot get from books. The entire syllabus will be made available upon registering for the course so you can look it over and bring it with you to the sessions.

What to do when Sales guys are Waterholics ...

Here is today's best question in my long list of emails. The Sales guys don't want Scrum in a company because they think they can't commit to the customer to close deals.

"We need to sign the contract first. The customer does not sign the contract, if finish date, price and features list are not in the contract. When using waterfall, the customer has all of that. That's how sales works. That's what we offer to them. With SCRUM either end date or features list is not defined. And end price is also not defined! We can't sell anything that way!"

Here is my answer ...

Your sales guy's are clueless about Scrum. They should take the Certified ScrumMaster class so they know what they are talking about. First they might start applying Scrum to their work in Sales. Then they could understand what the developers should be doing.

Our venture capital group runs company acquisitions using Scrum. The most junior guy on our team is the former SVP of Global Sales for Oracle. He could probably give a good answer for your sales force and maybe help them start using Scrum.

Basically, a sales plan calls for closing deals. This is the product backlog. The locity of closing should be known by the sales guys. They have a list of tasks that need to happen to close the deal as the opportunity moves through the sales funnel. This can all be mapped out on the Scrum board. They should have a burndown chart that shows deal closing for a Sprint. They can burn down revenue achieved.

The immediate deals are locked and loaded for closing. The ones further out are in the planning stage for closing. Further out the deals are forecast just like software features. You know you will achieve a closing velocity but don't know exactly which deals will close.

So for Scrum, whether for sales or software development you need a plan (product backlog). The product backlog needs to be prioritized. The closing velocity needs to be estimated by the individual teams, the revenue needs to be committed to in the plan based on closing velocity, and the projects need to be DONE (whether they are closing sales plans or finishing software development contracts). There is always a roadmap owned by the product owner from which commitments are made.

This is exactly the opposite of what your sales guy is saying. We have a lot of teams that say they are doing Scrum but do not have product backlog, estimates, velocity, and burndown. Your sales guy must have seen some of these dysfunctional teams and completely misinterpreted Scrum.

Trifork in Denmark runs their sales with Scrum. All their sales people are Certified ScrumMasters. Every time they stop updating the Scrum Board they start losing track of deals and revenue and need to refocus on getting the Scrum Board updated. The VP of Sales runs the board as most of the people are on the road all the time.

When they close a software development contract, a sales person is sometimes the ScrumMaster leading the software development team. In this way the sales guys make money for the company while selling instead of wasting a lot of money on their expenses and driving up cost of sales. Once inside the company as a ScrumMaster they can sell even more stuff.

As for development, some of the leading companies in the world are doing fixed price contracts in Scrum. They know all the features, they estimate them all, and they commit a date to deliver. They then work an Agile process to finish the contract early and save money for the customer while driving up margins for themselves. It may be your Scrum teams are in the very early stage of maturity and are not able to make the committments that the sales people need. Or they have not educated the sales people properly. This is the responsibility of your Chief Product Owner. Do you have one?

PatientKeeper HIMSS08: Scrum @work

PatientKeeper runs a Type C Scrum and quadrupled revenue in 2007. HIMSS is the biggest IT show in healthcare and PatientKeeper was one of the hottest companies there.

"I'm such a PK groupee now! I'll be sure to get that contract signed in the next 2 weeks."

"Everything you're doing is amazing. I need to call my account manager to talk about adding some of these web integrations."

"When we get back, can you call me so we can add Charge Capture?"

"PK is THE scariest vendor here. Everyone on the convention floor is intimidated by you."

"I have this physician portal, Medseek. No one likes it. We need to replace it with PK so the docs will be happy AND we'll have downtime. Call me next week."

"I stopped by the Thompson booth. It's clear they don"t have the same capabilities as you - UI or integration"

"I saw the Medseek demo. Anyone satisfied with that physician portal has their sights set way too low."

"You're booth is amazing. The mobility wall is way cool!"

"I told a couple of colleagues from other hospitals to come find you. That you guys were the answer to their meditech and physician sat issues."

"And everyone wants to be a PK partner. They all want to associated with the hottest company in HCIT.'

Scrum and Organizational Patterns

In the early days of what we now know as Agile processes, Mike Beedle was influenced by the online description of Scrum, implemented the process in his own company, and led the effort to drive Scrum through the Pattern Languages of Programming Design conferences. This made Scrum the first (and only) formal organizational pattern that describes a complete Agile process. One of the patterns books contains the Scrum pattern:

M. Beedle, M. Devos, Y. Sharon, K. Schwaber, and J. Sutherland, "Scrum: A Pattern Language for Hyperproductive Software Development," in Pattern Languages of Program Design. vol. 4, N. Harrison, Ed. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1999, pp. 637-651.

Recent work by Jim Coplien shows that Scrum is deceptively simply while compressing a complex array of organizational patterns in his book, "Organizational Patterns in Agile Software Development." Jim was surprised when he found that Scrum compresses at least 33 patterns from his book into a concept that can be explained in 2 minutes. It takes over 60 pages of rather dense text to describe these patterns. Click here for details of Jim's presentation on Scrum and patterns.

One of Scrum's design goals was to encapsulate best practices from 40 years of software development into a process that was simple enough for the average IT worker to use for development in less than 2 days of startup time. Jim's research shows that we did a good job of accomplishing that goal. You can download a copy of the complete Scrum pattern as it is part of a draft of "The Scrum Papers."

High Moon Studios: A Portrait - Scrum

Planning Poker Cards: Faster, Better, Cooler!

Photo of old verison of cards. New improved version photo coming soon!

I'm leaving Stockholm today after working with Crisp on Scrum training this week. In my bag are the new, upgraded, Crisp planning poker cards. Developers have been asking for more colors. We really need seven to support the typical Scrum team so each person has a different color. And the Planning Poker cards need numbers on the corners of the cards so you can seen the numbers when you hold a deck in your hand. The new cards solve these problems and Crisp has the only good web site for ordering Planning Poker cards so get them here!

Crisp needs to update it's web site. The photo is of the old cards. I'll post a photo of the new new improved version when I finish traveling today.

There are three best practices that have emerged for both Scrum and XP - User Stories, Planning Poker, and Scrum Boards. Lots of people have asked where to get Poker Planning cards. Many companies make these cards and none of them are as easy to sort as the color coded cards from Crisp in Sweden.

Estimating is one of the core activities in Scrum and other agile processes. This means the process of assessing the size of a story, i.e. how long it will take, how much work it is to implement, or how expensive it is.

In Scrum, estimating is a team activity. For each story, the whole team participates in the estimation process.

Planning poker is a simple but powerful tool that makes team-estimating faster, more accurate, and more fun. Some companies have eliminated 80% of their planning costs and are able to get better estimates using Planning Poker! Even if you are stuck in the mire of Waterfall planning these cards can help you avoid missed dates and death marches. Recommended for all developers.