distributed scrum for dutch...

Distributed Scrum for Dutch RailwaysJan Vermeir, Xebia

Scrum promises effective and efficient software development

Yes, it actually works

I will show you how we implement distributed Scrum for our customer

Classic outsourcing of software development

often fails to meet customer demands

Xebia's customer, ProRail, builds and maintains

railway infrastructure in the Netherlands

ProRail is a respectable organisation with a long history and a strong focus on reliability

The Netherlands has 6500 km of railway, 6000 trains and 1.2 million travelers daily. 85% of the trains leaves on time.

A program was started to improve information for

travelers

The programs aim was to improve timeliness and accuracy of information presented to travelers

PUB is part of the larger InfoPlus program. The PUBlication system displays and broadcasts information

The outsourcing strategy that was selected fosters

conflict

CONFLICT!

Xebia introduces distributed Scrum to

develiver quality software on time

Xebia introduces Scrum to build the PUBlication

system

Scrum helps you and your customer focus and prioritize

But it's hard to influence a waterfall-based environment

Distributed Scrum increases team size while

avoiding classical offshoring pitfalls

Scaling up to larger teams is difficult in the Netherlands

150

The cost of developers in India is lower, availability is higher

30

Joint development with Xebia India allows us to scale

Our customer was unfamiliar with both Agile

development and offshoring.

We were facing a list of challenges

We had to help our customer to adopt Scrum

It is very important to choose your product owner carefully

Waterfall driven requirements are no substitute for user stories

Testing was based on requirements while development was based on user stories

Requirements written in Dutch cannot be used in India

How do I implement distributed Scrum?

Effective communication is one of the key success

factors

Skype, wiki, mailinglist and VNC allow distributed teams to interact at low cost but with high quality

One backlog allows teams to coordinate their work

One version control system ensures we never lose track of each others work

Team members visited the other location during the project

Team composition is very important as well

We started with a small co-located team of Dutch and Indian colleagues

We applied the cell concept to scale up

We don't suffer 'us' and 'them' feelings because teams are mixed across locations

11 star players do not make a great soccer team

'Quality without compromise' pays off,

even during the project

'The maintainability of the system is very good''The quality of the source code is very high'

PUB shows consistently less errors than other parts of the program

The nightly quality build fails if code quality is too low, based on Findbugs and PMD. Developers use Checkstyle for Eclipse.

Unit test coverage is high.

80%

Quality software requires extensive testing

We use Fitnesse to test user scenario's

We take testing very seriously...

Test Pages: 497 right, 10 wrong, 0 ignored,

0 exceptions Assertions: 29606 right, 54 wrong, 0 ignored, 11

exceptions

User interface testing is still manual, which hurts every two weeks when we deliver a new iteration

Set up a separate team to handle

exceptions

Team Green handles whatever doesn't fit in regular iteration work

Performance and stability were tested on a regular basis

The customer required us to provide answers to several lengthy check lists

Documentation was written by a technical writer

Scrum in distributed teams allowed Xebia to deliver quality software on time within budget

Resources

• Scrum User Group Portugal http://www.scrumpt.com

• PT Scrum events http://www.fullsix.pt/scrum/

• Scrum Mail Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumpt

scrumpt@yahoogroups.com

• Scrum Alliance http://www.scrumalliance.com/

• Mitch Lacey http://www.mitchlacey.com