ICCS06/269
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Jeff Sutherland, CTO, PatientKeeper, Inc., Newton, MA, US
Anton Victorov, StarSoft Development Labs, St. Petersburg, Russia
Jack Blount, CTO, SirciDynix, Provo, UT, US
Adaptive Engineering of Large Software Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams
Abstract
Agile project management with Scrum derives from Takeuchi and Nonaka analyses of best practices in companies like Fuji-Xerox, Honda, Canon, and Toyota. Toyota routinely achieves four times the productivity and 12 times the quality of competitors. The Scrum development process was designed for complex adaptive systems and depends on self-organization of teams. Can Scrum achieve Toyota level performance for globally distributed engineering teams? Two Agile companies, SirsiDynix using Scrum, and StarSoft Development Laboratories using Scrum with some XP engineering practices, achieved comparable performance developing a Java application with over 1,000,000 lines of code. Their Horizon project is a completely new implementation of a library system with over 12,500 installed sites. During the most recent year of the project, 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. Using XP refactoring techniques they then systematically eliminated 275,000 lines of code to achieve better usability, performance, reliability, and maintainability. At 15.3 function points per developer/month, this is one of the most productive projects 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 some practices advocated by the Scrum Alliance. This paper analyzes and recommends new best practices for globally distributed Agile teams.
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Presentation at the 6th International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS), June 25-30, 2006; Boston, MA
ICCS06 Conference Program
Hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI)
