Presenters: Vladimir Blagojevic, Olivier Biot, Nick Boucart & Wim Codenie

Objectives:

We'll give you a simple tool to better understand and manage your Scrum teams, both within and beyond the context of software development. The underlying simple metrics emerged from a study of 9 different teams, each applying Scrum to build other kinds of products than pure software products. Amazingly, the results uncovered two basic parameters applicable to both software and non-software developments: team's shared commitment and resolving ability. Participants will also get some insights in how to improve the team's working and increase effectiveness of Scrum.

Intended audience:

This session is targeted at people that want to know if scrum can work in their team/organization, people interested in applying scrum principles within their organization other then pure software development. Also people with mixed experiences in applying scrum can find some answers on why Scrum did not deliver the expected boost in their context.

Contents

Scrum is a successful agile management method for incremental software development whose success has raised an interest outside the software community. Can Scrum principles be applied to develop other types of products than software products? In this session, we will present the results of a study of several such alternative applications of Scrum (study included 9 different teams, each of them involved in building other kinds of products than pure software products). We identified four different models for applying Scrum based on two parameters: team's shared commitment and resolving ability. We developed a method called "Agile Probe" that allows you to position your team within those four models:

  • Homogenous Model
  • Coordination Model
  • Co-opetition Model
  • Dependency Model

This research resulted in a paper that we will presented during on Agile2008 in Toronto. It is also a continuation of last year's session - it's time to give something back to the community.

Format and length: 60 min presentation and interactive exercises