Scrum for Global-Scale Development

A global development organization—in seven cities on three continents—has developers all using agile practices to develop complex applications. In addition to the common problems faced by distributed teams, they must deal with attrition rates in excess of 50 percent, possible loss of intellectual property, and the need to integrate the work of multiple Scrum teams into a single build. James Lynn describes an organizational structure that includes implementation teams, known as “the Factory.” Developers in the Factory often have little in-depth knowledge of the application or customer. Assisting the Factory are architecture teams that provide oversight, communication, coordination, and technical direction. The architecture teams include new roles such as Code Trolls who develop reference implementations for services and patterns to ensure the production of consistent code to common coding standards and quality measurements. These trolls review code against metrics standards, test case standards, and coverage. Learn how one organization successfully coordinated the efforts of massive, distributed development projects.