Fully Distributed Scrum: The Secret Sauce for Hyperproductive Offshored Development Teams

Jeff Sutherland, Guido Schoonheim, Eelco Rustenburg, Maurits Rijk
2008 Agile 2008 Conference  
Scrum was designed to achieve a hyperproductive state where productivity increases 5-10 times over industry averages and many collocated teams have achieved this effect. The question for this paper is whether distributed, offshore teams can consistently achieve the hyperproductive state. In particular, can a team establish a localized velocity and then maintain or increase that velocity when distributing teams across continents. Since 2006, Xebia started projects with half Dutch and half Indian
more » ... team members. After establishing localized hyperproductivity, they move the Indian members of the team to India and show increasing velocity with fully distributed teams. After running XP engineering practices inside many distributed Scrum projects, Xebia has systematically productized a model very similar to the SirsiDynix model [1] for high performance, distributed, offshore teams with outstanding quality. Challenges in outsourcing offshore U.S., European, or Japanese companies often outsource software development to offshore locations like Eastern Europe, Russia, or the Far East. Typically, remote teams operate independently and communication problems lower productivity. Most offshoring organizations require detailed specifications before they begin a project and theses traditional project planning methodologies show high failure rates.
doi:10.1109/agile.2008.92 dblp:conf/agiledc/SutherlandSRR08 fatcat:gh3vayiqxfgufieifjfykk7asy