SCRUM

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

Do your developers want to try a new approach but are constrained because your customer or project manager isn’t interested in changing? Heather Oppenheimer shares the story of how one company was able to reconcile the development team’s desire to use Scrum with the customer’s requirement for status reporting based on waterfall phases. When they started, the project managers were complaining that they weren’t getting the status information they needed, and the developers were whining that their priorities were being changed daily.