Case study: Distributed Scrum project for Dutch railways

Presenter: Jan Vermeir

Objective(s) of the session:

In this session we will show you how we successfully completed a project using Scrum at Dutch railways.

Intended audience and prerequisites:

Developers, team leads and managers interested in how to be successful with distributed Scrum in general and in waterfall companies.

Contents:

Scrum provides a proven foundation for the execution of projects. However, in every project the Scrum process must be implemented while addressing specific needs and circumstances. How this is done is a large factor in the success or failure of a project. In this presentation, we describe how we executed a 20 man-years, 100.000+ lines of code Scrum project with resources in both India and the Netherlands. Technology used inludes Java, Spring, Weblogic, Oracle and Flex. The team delivered a first version with enough features for production use. Currently the customer is testing the system and the team is about to switch to maintenance.
The lessons we learned may help you to do successful Scrum projects.
In the project team we will describe in this session, Jan has mainly worked on non-functional requirements and enjoyed watching a motivated and professional team being successful.

We want to show you how we overcame some of the hurdles in this project:

- In order to staff the project we involved our Indian collegues, constructing mixed teams of developers. It took quite some time and some specific measures to make this work. We use Skype in our daily stand ups as well as for peer-to-peer discussions. The code is in a single code base. People visit the other location frequently. This way we forged a focused team bridging two time zones and cultures.

- Our customer was used to fire-and-forget outsourcing, i.e. they expected to send a long list of specs to contractors and test the product at the end of the project. We had to change this mindset to get the information we need and especially to allow us to work in two-week iterations.

- To cope with our environment we found it necessary to introduce a team that was focused on keeping disturbances and noise away from the development teams.

Format and length: 60 min presentation