Inkubook.com came into existence in March 2008 when an existing software development and marketing organization received a new CEO and was immediately tasked with building an entirely different product. This report discusses the evolution from the existing Scrum process through four major changes as the team’s process shifted to meet the team’s goals and management’s demands. Focus will be given to the barriers benefits that the team perceived with each stage. Where possible, a discussion of the unintended consequences of the team’s actions will be explored with specific examples.

In a large agile organization (more than three teams or 30 team members) with self-organized empowered teams, R&D leadership roles still exist to support these teams through topics including resource management and strategic vision. This talk will highlight these R&D leadership roles, describe several example R&D organization structures, and then describe the behaviors (good and bad) stimulated by these structures, the challenges, and their impact on the teams. The talk concludes by describing the key attributes of leaders who will thrive in a large agile organization.

Admit it. You’ve always wanted to know how people are actually using that product you spent so much time developing. That can be done more quickly than you’ve seen before and it can improve your product a lot. If we can include some UX activities into the kind of under-pressure operation that the Obama For America campaign ran, there is hope for any Agile project.

The authors previously showed Scrum teams using XP practices achieved distributed velocity equal to local velocity with multiple distributed teams. Local velocity equaled distributed velocity and production increased linearly as teams scaled up to over 50 developers. Here we show a similar pattern for extreme time zone differences between San Francisco and India. Local velocity was established at five times industry average waterfall velocity. When team members were added in india, production scaled linearly.

It is the late-80’s and the U.S. Department of Defense is rolling out a new state-of-the-art system for scheduling satellite tracking stations that uses a text-driven display and communication over serial lines. Now 15 years, 3 failed replacements and over 20 million tax payer dollars later a final attempt at replacing the crippled system gets underway…using Agile. This experience report will cover the challenges faced developing a critical application in iterations while satisfying the customers requirement that deliverables be made using the traditional waterfall lifecycle.

A major challenge for software organizations is creating software that can continue to adapt and change over time, a code base the team can live with. This session reviews the lessons learned from CruiseControl, a popular tool for continuous integration. CruiseControl is an open source success story not only because it has had over 400,000 downloads but also because it has successfully contributed to by over 200 different people. For practitioners who are tired of brittle code that must be discarded and rewritten CruiseControl provides valuable lessons.

This session will focus on the unique challenges companies face when using agile on projects that involve FDA governance: large company conservative culture, regulatory documentation, requirements tracing, and a bias towards waterfall development.

Skeptics argue that agile is best suited to small- and medium-sized companies and wrongly perceive agile as a limited, negating its use in the highly regulated corporate world.

In reality we will show you how we’ve successfully implemented agile in large sized companies operating in a highly regulated world.

In 2007, OpenView Venture Partners decided to adopt Scrum as best practice in software development in its portfolio companies and Scrum as the standard practice in all internal operations. The OpenView Scrum teams aggressively remove all impediments (take no prisoners). Attached is a reference model that supports best practices in management, sales, marketing, finance, development, and customer support in OpenView portfolio companies. After over 52 weekly Sprints, OpenView is the first non-software Scrum to provide a working manual on how to do Scrum outside of software development.

The off-shore model for IT services is held up as the most cost effective delivery model. As companies gain experience with the out-sourced model, it is becoming clear that there are serious flaws even using Agile methodologies.
The presenter will directly compare the productivity metrics of off-shore distributed Agile teams with co-located Agile Teams. Co-located teams are far more productive and cost effective even accounting for the relative lower resource cost. Companies should be rediscovering co-located project teams as the paradigm for delivering real value for their IT projects.

Could an executive team be happy using Scrum? Yes, it’s possible! Picture the scene: executives of strategic departments (financial, HR, IT, sales & marketing, production, etc.) being part of a cross-functional executive team…an executive Product Owner prioritizing an Executive Product Backlog that helps the team to follow the company’s vision. What are the main challenges of an executive ScrumMaster? In this session I will show a real case of a Brazilian company that uses Scrum in their executive team.