Scrum Beat
By Stephanie Fagnani, Projects@Work
Organizations of different stripes are discovering that the methodology known as Scrum offers a faster, safer route to quality software development — including Idaho’s Health and Welfare Department and financial management solutions firm Intuit, which both call upon a Scrum-based lifecycle management tool to help them navigate the wide open terrain.
Encouraged by a Scrum-led project that went off without a hitch, the project management staff of the State of Idaho Health and Welfare Department committed to using the same methodology on future efforts, including a major four-phase project to replace a 22-year-old legacy mainframe application.
An online search for a Scrum training provider in the Northwest led the agency to Danube Technologies, a company specializing in management and engineering best practices for software development organizations. Department members attended training courses in the summer of 2006, and soon adopted Danube’s ScrumWorks Pro lifecycle management solution for the first phase of the legacy replacement project, which involved creating capacity-building tools for the department’s clients to help them accomplish their daily workload.
The second phase, lasting about 14 months, revolved around identifying and acquiring the best-in-class tools that would be the foundation for the new system. Phase three started earlier this year and involves customizing those acquired products for the department’s specific needs and integrating them so the end system works seamlessly for the users.
Using ScrumWorks on all phases of the project to date, the department has prioritized work and created teams led by product owners and Scrum Masters. Team members use the tool daily to update the status of tasks and identify impediments, while the product owners use the tool to update priorities, backlog items and check their team’s burndown.
“For all the team members, not a day goes by where we aren’t focused the information that ScrumWorks provides us,” says Randy Ashton, senior project manager in the Health and Welfare department. “All our information is transparent and available to anyone who wishes to view it. The web reports feature allows anyone in the organization to view progress and backlogs — we have no secrets.”
While Ashton says it’s difficult to offer apples-to-apples comparison between his team’s Scrum approach and project management methods used in other departments, he believes the strong communication between project teams and management, fostered by the ScrumWorks tool, is a clear differentiator. And he notes that conversations with other state agency project managers indicate that agile methods are gaining acceptance in the government arena overall.
To ease the transition to Agile for hesitant organizations, Danube offered ScrumWorks free upon its launch in 2004 and through 2007. Victor Szalvay, chief technology officer and co-founder of Danube, said this strategy allowed companies to get familiar with Scrum “below the radar,” without needing to seek a financial outlay or even formal approval from senior management. It also provided software developers a low-risk demonstration of how a less structured approach could be successful.
“Software is a lot different than other projects because there are no physical laws, which makes it extremely uncertain and hard to operate in a linear, defined methodology,” Szalvay says. “There is a natural inclination if things are not going well to apply further constraint and get a better hold on it from a control type set-up, so it’s almost counterintuitive to take a step back and let teams work on their own and do what it takes to reach high-level goals and then be able to change along the way. So, naturally there is resistance.”
Basab Dattaray, development manager for Intuit’s TurboTax software, admits he was a little apprehensive about using a tool like ScrumWorks, but he says the outcome of an initial trial in early 2007 was quickly put his mind at ease. Today, about 300 employees in Intuit’s Consumer Tax Group use Scrum methods, including the tool, on a daily basis to manage their projects.
The procedure at Intuit is typical of the most Scrum-based project management approaches. At the beginning of each monthly sprint, the company outlines tasks and posts them in the backlog of ScrumWorks where they are prioritized. Developers self-assign from among the high priority tasks, deciphering roughly how much time will be required to finish the jobs. Priority adjustments are made accordingly, and daily, 15-minute standup meetings are held to assess progress and potential hurdles. The burndown feature in ScrumWorks also helps developers view the progress of the entire team, which aids in assessing how much work is needed to complete goals.
“People are more focused, so it does cut down time,” Dattaray says. “It also grounds people in reality in that at any time we can tell how the project is doing. If we need more resources then we can get those. If we didn’t have this information, we wouldn’t know at any point in time where we are and it would be kind of a guess.
“I’ve noticed also the quality of what we develop tends to be higher because people take the tasks themselves, and it’s not managers saying it will take so much time.”
At the end of each sprint, results are demoed and the product manager reviews how many tasks were completed. The Scrum approach is a less bureaucratic, process-oriented methodology than traditional project management practices, according to Dattaray, allowing developers to work in a way that brings out their best.
“It really helps us plan. If we have a deadline and it’s going slow we can do something about it as opposed to the traditional waterfall method where you don’t discover problems until you are eight months into the project,” Dattaray says. “With most products you will see features that are never even used. Scrum forces you to build the high priority things and once you are done you give it to the customer and let the market give you feedback. It’s part of the agile way of developing.”
To date, more than half of the Fortune 100 companies have embraced the ScrumWorks tools as a means to implement agile, Scrum-based collaboration and project management, Szalvay says. In an effort to further foster use of this methodology, Danube recently released ScrumWorks Pro 3.1with improved collaboration and visibility components.
“Scrum is really leading the charge now in terms of bringing agile into really big companies who are rolling it out enterprise-wide,” Szalvay says. “The reason it’s appealing is that it addresses the business and management side, and says nothing about engineering practices. The promise is that through regular iteration your stakeholders can be apprised of progress because you are developing, feature by feature, and encouraging change throughout the project lifecycle.
“Businesses, especially at the higher level, really like the fact that they can start a project and iterate their way toward the right product, because they are often wrong when they conceive of something up front.”
This article originally appeared in the online edition of Projects@Work on Monday, September 15, 2008. To access it online, visit: http://www.projectsatwork.com/article.cfm?ID=244734&authenticated=1
Organizations of different stripes are discovering that the methodology known as Scrum offers a faster, safer route to quality software development — including Idaho’s Health and Welfare Department and financial management solutions firm Intuit, which both call upon a Scrum-based lifecycle management tool to help them navigate the wide open terrain.
Encouraged by a Scrum-led project that went off without a hitch, the project management staff of the State of Idaho Health and Welfare Department committed to using the same methodology on future efforts, including a major four-phase project to replace a 22-year-old legacy mainframe application.
An online search for a Scrum training provider in the Northwest led the agency to Danube Technologies, a company specializing in management and engineering best practices for software development organizations. Department members attended training courses in the summer of 2006, and soon adopted Danube’s ScrumWorks Pro lifecycle management solution for the first phase of the legacy replacement project, which involved creating capacity-building tools for the department’s clients to help them accomplish their daily workload.
The second phase, lasting about 14 months, revolved around identifying and acquiring the best-in-class tools that would be the foundation for the new system. Phase three started earlier this year and involves customizing those acquired products for the department’s specific needs and integrating them so the end system works seamlessly for the users.
Using ScrumWorks on all phases of the project to date, the department has prioritized work and created teams led by product owners and Scrum Masters. Team members use the tool daily to update the status of tasks and identify impediments, while the product owners use the tool to update priorities, backlog items and check their team’s burndown.
“For all the team members, not a day goes by where we aren’t focused the information that ScrumWorks provides us,” says Randy Ashton, senior project manager in the Health and Welfare department. “All our information is transparent and available to anyone who wishes to view it. The web reports feature allows anyone in the organization to view progress and backlogs — we have no secrets.”
While Ashton says it’s difficult to offer apples-to-apples comparison between his team’s Scrum approach and project management methods used in other departments, he believes the strong communication between project teams and management, fostered by the ScrumWorks tool, is a clear differentiator. And he notes that conversations with other state agency project managers indicate that agile methods are gaining acceptance in the government arena overall.
To ease the transition to Agile for hesitant organizations, Danube offered ScrumWorks free upon its launch in 2004 and through 2007. Victor Szalvay, chief technology officer and co-founder of Danube, said this strategy allowed companies to get familiar with Scrum “below the radar,” without needing to seek a financial outlay or even formal approval from senior management. It also provided software developers a low-risk demonstration of how a less structured approach could be successful.
“Software is a lot different than other projects because there are no physical laws, which makes it extremely uncertain and hard to operate in a linear, defined methodology,” Szalvay says. “There is a natural inclination if things are not going well to apply further constraint and get a better hold on it from a control type set-up, so it’s almost counterintuitive to take a step back and let teams work on their own and do what it takes to reach high-level goals and then be able to change along the way. So, naturally there is resistance.”
Basab Dattaray, development manager for Intuit’s TurboTax software, admits he was a little apprehensive about using a tool like ScrumWorks, but he says the outcome of an initial trial in early 2007 was quickly put his mind at ease. Today, about 300 employees in Intuit’s Consumer Tax Group use Scrum methods, including the tool, on a daily basis to manage their projects.
The procedure at Intuit is typical of the most Scrum-based project management approaches. At the beginning of each monthly sprint, the company outlines tasks and posts them in the backlog of ScrumWorks where they are prioritized. Developers self-assign from among the high priority tasks, deciphering roughly how much time will be required to finish the jobs. Priority adjustments are made accordingly, and daily, 15-minute standup meetings are held to assess progress and potential hurdles. The burndown feature in ScrumWorks also helps developers view the progress of the entire team, which aids in assessing how much work is needed to complete goals.
“People are more focused, so it does cut down time,” Dattaray says. “It also grounds people in reality in that at any time we can tell how the project is doing. If we need more resources then we can get those. If we didn’t have this information, we wouldn’t know at any point in time where we are and it would be kind of a guess.
“I’ve noticed also the quality of what we develop tends to be higher because people take the tasks themselves, and it’s not managers saying it will take so much time.”
At the end of each sprint, results are demoed and the product manager reviews how many tasks were completed. The Scrum approach is a less bureaucratic, process-oriented methodology than traditional project management practices, according to Dattaray, allowing developers to work in a way that brings out their best.
“It really helps us plan. If we have a deadline and it’s going slow we can do something about it as opposed to the traditional waterfall method where you don’t discover problems until you are eight months into the project,” Dattaray says. “With most products you will see features that are never even used. Scrum forces you to build the high priority things and once you are done you give it to the customer and let the market give you feedback. It’s part of the agile way of developing.”
To date, more than half of the Fortune 100 companies have embraced the ScrumWorks tools as a means to implement agile, Scrum-based collaboration and project management, Szalvay says. In an effort to further foster use of this methodology, Danube recently released ScrumWorks Pro 3.1with improved collaboration and visibility components.
“Scrum is really leading the charge now in terms of bringing agile into really big companies who are rolling it out enterprise-wide,” Szalvay says. “The reason it’s appealing is that it addresses the business and management side, and says nothing about engineering practices. The promise is that through regular iteration your stakeholders can be apprised of progress because you are developing, feature by feature, and encouraging change throughout the project lifecycle.
“Businesses, especially at the higher level, really like the fact that they can start a project and iterate their way toward the right product, because they are often wrong when they conceive of something up front.”
This article originally appeared in the online edition of Projects@Work on Monday, September 15, 2008. To access it online, visit: http://www.projectsatwork.com/article.cfm?ID=244734&authenticated=1
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