Jeff Sutherlands

Scrum Handbook

Everything
you need
to know
to start
a Scrum project
in your
organization

scrum
training
institute
press

This book is dedicated to Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and the

Grameen Bank for originating microenterprise development and the
Accion International Presidents Advisory Board, responsible for much of
microenterprise development in the western hemisphere.
The strategy for bootstrapping the poor out of poverty has been
a model for freeing hundreds of thousands of software developers from
developer abuse caused by poor management practices.
Thanks to the reviewers of the text who include among many others:
Tom Poppendieck
Henrick Kniberg
Rowan Bunning
Clifford Thompson

About this book

This manual is based on The Scrum Papers, published by The Scrum
Training Institute (see www.scrumtraininginstitute.com).
For information on how to receive your own copy, please contact
the author:
Jeff Sutherland
Scrum Training Institute
32 Appleton Street
Somerville, MA 02144
[email protected]

Executive Summary
Scrum is an agile method designed to add energy, focus, clarity,
and transparency to project planning and implementation. Today,
Scrum is used in small, mid-sized and large software corporations
all over the world.
Properly implemented, Scrum will:
Increase speed of development
Align individual and corporate objectives
Create a culture driven by performance
Support shareholder value creation
Achieve stable and consistent communication of
performance at all levels
Enhance individual development and quality of life
This manual gives some basic information on how to get started
with Scrum, and also describes some cases in point. It is based on
The Scrum Papers, formerly published by The Scrum Training
Institute (see www.scrumtraininginstitute.com).

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

Contents
Preface

1. Scrum at a glance

2. The Scrum Roles

14

3. Getting Started with Scrum

18

4. Scrum Cases

38

5. The SirsiDynix Case

46

6. Can Scrum projects fail?

59

Appendix
1. Whos who in Scrum
2. References

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

...
In less than a decade

Scrum has risen from being a method used by a number of

enthusiasts at the Easel Corporation in 1993, to one of the worlds
most popular and well-known frameworks for development of
software. The continued expansion of the global rollout of Scrum is
testimony to the fact that Scrum delivers on its promise.
While it is often said that Scrum is not a silver bullet, Scrum can be
like a heat-seeking missile when pointed in the right direction. Its
inspect and adapt approach to continuous quality improvement can do
serious damage to outmoded business practices. By focusing on
building communities of stakeholders, encouraging a better life for
developers, and delivering extreme business value to customers
Scrum can release creativity and team spirit in practitioners and make
the world a better place to live and work.
Scrum has emerged from a rough structure for iterative,
incremental development to a refined, well-structured, straightforward framework for complex product development. Ive worked
with others to adjust, test, and adjust it again until it is solid. This
framework is fully defined in the Scrum Guide at www.scrum.org,
where Ken Schwaber and I sustain and help it emerge further.
The manual you are holding has been compiled from papers and
compendiums which have been used at the Scrum Training Institute
(The Scrum Papers). We hope that it may serve both as an
inspiration and a source of information for those readers who intend
to start their first Scrum projects in their organizations. Seasoned
Scrum users may also find some nuggets of wisdom. In any case, we
appreciate all kinds of feedback. The Scrum adventure has just begun
for us all!

Yours faithfully,

Jeff Sutherland
Chairman, Scrum Training Institute
Co-Creator of Scrum
Boston, USA
July 2010

CHAPTER 1

Scrum at a Glance
Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for projects and
product or application development.
Scrum structures development in cycles of work called Sprints.
These iterations are less than one month in length, and usuallly
measured in weeks. Sprints take place one after the other. The
Sprints are of fixed duration they end on a specific date whether
the work has been completed or not, and are never extended. Hence,
they are said to be timeboxed.
At the beginning of each Sprint, a cross-functional team selects
items (customer requirements) from a prioritized list. They commit
to complete the items by the end of the Sprint. During the Sprint, the
chosen items do not change. Every day the Team gathers briefly to
replan its work to optimize the likelihood of meeting committments.
At the end of the Sprint, the team reviews the Sprint with
stakeholders, and demonstrates what they have built. People obtain
feedback that can be incorporated in the next Sprint.
Inspect & adapt
Scrum emphasizes a working product at the end of the Sprint that is
really done; in the case of software, this means code that is:
integrated
fully tested
potentially shippable
A major theme in Scrum is inspect and adapt. Since development
inevitably involves learning, innovation, and surprises, Scrum
emphasizes taking a short step of development, inspecting both the
resulting product and the efficacy of current practices, and then
adapting the product goals and process practices. Repeat forever.

A major theme in Scrum is

inspect and adapt.

Agile Development and Scrum

Scrum is, as the reader supposedly knows, an agile method. The agile
family of development methods evolved from the old and wellknown iterative and incremental life-cycle approaches. They were
born out of a belief that an approach more grounded in human reality
and the product development reality of learning, innovation, and
change would yield better results.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

The original Scrum paper

Takeuchi, Hirotaka; Nonaka, Ikujiro
(January-February 1986). The New
New Product Development Game.
Harvard Business Review.

Scrum a Rugby term

Scrum [---] in the sports of rugby
union and rugby league, is a way of
restarting the game, either after an
accidental infringement or (in rugby
league only) when the ball has gone
out of play. [---]
[A] scrum is formed by the players
who are designated forwards binding
together in three rows. The scrum
then engages with the opposition
team so that the players heads are
interlocked with those of the other
side's front row. The scrum half from
the team that did not infringe then
throws the ball into the tunnel
created in the space between the two
sets of front rowers legs. Both teams
may then try to compete for the ball
by trying to hook the ball backwards
with their feet.
(From Wikipedia)

Agile principles emphasize building working software that people

can get hands on quickly, versus spending a lot of time writing
specifications up front. Agile development focuses on crossfunctional teams empowered to make decisions, versus big
hierarchies and compartmentalization by function. It also focuses on
rapid iteration, with continuous customer input along the way. Often
when people learn about agile development or Scrum, theres a
glimmer of recognition it sounds a lot like back in the start-up days
when we just did it.
Scrum was strongly influenced by a 1986 Harvard Business
Review article on the practices associated with successful product
development groups; in this paper the term Scrum was introduced,
relating successful development to the game of Rugby in which a
self-organizing (self-managing) team moves together down the field
of product development. The first Scrum team was created at Easel
Corporation in 1993 by Dr. Jeff Sutherland (the author of this
manual) and the Scrum framework was formalized in 1995 by Ken
Schwaber.
Used at major companies
Today, scrum is used by companies large and small, including:
Yahoo!
Microsoft
Google
Lockheed Martin
Johns Hopkins APL
Siemens
Nokia
Motorola, SAP
Cisco
GE
CapitalOne
US Federal Reserve
Teams using Scrum report significant improvements, and in some
cases complete transformations, in both productivity and morale. For
product developers many of whom have been burned by the
management fad of the month club this is significant. Or to put it
plain: Scrum is just simple and powerful!

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

Part I

Scrum Basics

This is How Scrum Works

The Scrum Team is comprised of
three Scrum Roles

1 The Product Backlog

A Scrum project is driven by a product vision compiled by the
Product Owner, and expressed in the Product Backlog. The Product
Backlog is a prioritized list of whats required, ranked in order of
value to the customer or business, with the highest value items at the
top of the list. The Product Backlog evolves over the lifetime of the
project, and items are continuously added, removed or reprioritized.

A. The Product Owner

Takes the inputs of what the product
should be and translates them into a
product vision or a Product Backlog.

2 The Sprint
Scrum structures product development in cycles of work called
Sprints, iterations of work which are typically 14 weeks in length.
The Sprints are of fixed duration and end on a specific date whether
the work has been completed or not; they are never extended.

B. The Team
Develops the product envisioned by the
Product Owner.

3 Sprint Planning
At the beginning of each Sprint, the Sprint Planning Meeting takes
place. The Product Owner and Scrum Team (with facilitation from
the ScrumMaster) review the Product Backlog, discuss the goals and
context for the items, and the Scrum Team selects the items from the
Product Backlog to commit to complete by the end of the Sprint,
starting at the top of the Product Backlog.
Each item selected from the Product Backlog is designed and then
broken down to a set of individual tasks. The list of tasks is recorded
in a document called the Sprint Backlog.

C. The Scrum Master

Does whatever it takes to make the
Scrum Team successful,such as
removingorganizational impediments,
facilitating meetings, acting as a
gatekeeperso no one unnecessary
interrupts the team's work.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

4 Daily Scrum Meeting

Once the Sprint has started, the Scrum Team engages in another of
the key Scrum practices: The Daily Stand-Up Meeting. This is a
short (15 minutes) meeting that happens every workday at
an appointed time. Everyone on the team attends. At this meeting,
the information needed to inspect progress is presented. This
information may result in replanning and further discussions
immediately after the Daily Scrum.
5 Sprint Review and Retrospective
After the Sprint ends, there is the Sprint Review, where the Scrum
Team and stakeholder inspect what was done during the Sprint,
discuss it, and figure out what to do next. Present at this meeting are
the Product Owner, Team Members, and ScrumMaster, plus
customers, stakeholders, experts, executives, and anyone else
interested.
Following the Sprint Review, the team gets together for the Sprint
Retrospective which is an opportunity for the team to discuss whats
working and whats not working, and agree on changes to try.
10

Daily Scrum
24 hrs

Sprint Planning Meeting 2

Sprint Backlog

Vision

New functionality
is demonstrated at
end of Sprint

Sprint Backlog

Sprint Planning Meeting 1

Sprint Retrospective

Product Backlog

Product
Owner

11

Whats Wrong With

Traditional Software Development?
The traditional way to build software, used by companies big and small,
was a sequential life cycle of which there are many variants (such as the
V-Model). Commonly, it is known as The Waterfall.
1. It typically begins with a detailed planning phase, where the end
product is carefully thought through, designed, and documented in great
detail.
2. The tasks necessary to execute the design are determined, and the
work is organized using tools such as Gantt charts and applications such as
Microsoft Project. The team arrives at an estimate of how long the
development will take by adding up detailed estimates of the individual
steps involved.
3. Once stakeholders have thoroughly reviewed the plan and provided
their approvals, the team starts to work.
4. Team members complete their specialized portion of the work, and
then hand it off to others in production-line fashion.
5. Once the work is complete, it is delivered to a testing organization
(some call this Quality Assurance), which completes testing prior to the
product reaching the customer. Throughout the process, strict controls are
placed on deviations from the plan to ensure that what is produced is
actually what was designed.
This approach has strengths and weaknesses. Its great strength is that it is
supremely logical think before you build, write it all down, follow a plan,
and keep everything as organized as possible. It has just one great
weakness: humans are involved. Hence a lot of problems occur:

Creativity is inhibited
This approach requires that the good ideas all come at the beginning of the
release cycle, where they can be incorporated into the plan. But as we all
know, good ideas appear throughout the process in the beginning, the
middle, and sometimes even the day before launch. A process that does
not permit change will stifle this innovation. With the waterfall, a great
idea late in the release cycle is not a gift, its a threat.

Written documents have their limitations

The waterfall approach places a great emphasis on writing things down as
a primary method for communicating critical information. The very
reasonable assumption is that if I can write down on paper as much as
possible of whats in my head, it will more reliably make it into the head
of everyone else on the team; plus, if its on paper, there is tangible proof
that Ive done my job. The reality, though, is that most of the time these
highly detailed 50-page requirements documents just do not get read.
When they do get read, the misunderstandings are often compounded. A
written document is an incomplete picture of my ideas; when you read it,
you create another abstraction, which is now two steps away from what I
think I meant to say at that time. It is no surprise that serious
misunderstandings occur.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

12

 Bad timing
Something else that happens when you have humans involved is the handson aha moment the first time that you actually use the working product.
You immediately think of 20 ways you could have made it better.
Unfortunately, these very valuable insights often come at the end of the
release cycle, when changes are most difficult and disruptive in other
words, when doing the right thing is most expensive, at least when using a
traditional method.

No crystal balls
Humans are not able to predict the future. For example, your competition
makes an announcement that was not expected. Unanticipated technical
problems crop up that force a change in direction. Furthermore, people are
particularly bad at planning uncertain things far into the future guessing
today how you will be spending your week eight months from now is
something of a fantasy. It has been the downfall of many a carefully
constructed Gantt chart.

Too much work and no fun

In addition, a sequential life cycle tends to foster an adversarial
relationship between the people that are handing work off from one to the
next. Hes asking me to build something thats not in the specification.
Shes changing her mind. I cant be held responsible for something I
dont control. And this gets us to another observation about sequential
development it is not much fun. The waterfall model is a cause of great
misery for the people who build products. The resulting products fall well
short of expressing the creativity, skill, and passion of their creators.
People are not robots, and a process that requires them to act like robots
results in unhappiness.

Sub-optimized results
A rigid, change-resistant process produces mediocre products. Customers
may get what they first ask for (at least two translation steps removed), but
is it what they really want once they see the product? By gathering all the
requirements up front and having them set in stone, the product is
condemned to be only as good as the initial idea, instead of being the best
once people have learned or discovered new things.
Many practitioners of a sequential life cycle experience these shortcomings
again and again. But, it seems so supremely logical that the common
reaction is to turn inward: If only we did it better, it would work, and if
we just planned more, documented more, resisted change more, everything
would work smoothly. Unfortunately, many teams find just the opposite:
the harder they try, the worse it gets! There are also management teams
that have invested their reputation and many resources in a waterfall
model; changing to a fundamentally different model is an apparent
admission of having made a mistake. And Scrum is fundamentally
different ...

13

CHAPTER 2

The Scrum Roles

In Scrum, there are three primary roles: The Product Owner,
The Team and The Scrum Master.

The Product Owner

The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing return on
investment (ROI) by identifying product features, translating
these into a prioritized feature list, deciding which should be at
the top of the list for the next Sprint, and continually reprioritizing and refining the list.
The Product Owner has profit and loss responsibility
for the product, assuming it is a commercial product.
In the case of an internal application, the Product
Owner is not responsible for ROI in the sense of a
commercial product (that will generate revenue),
but they are still responsible for maximizing ROI in
the sense of choosing each Sprint the highestbusiness-value lowest-cost items.
Not a product manager
In some cases, the Product Owner and the customer are
the same person; this is common for internal applications.
In others, the customer might be millions of people with a
variety of needs, in which case the Product Owner role is
similar to the Product Manager or Product Marketing
Manager position in many product organizations. However,
the Product Owner is somewhat different than a traditional
Product Manager because they actively and frequently
interact with the team, personally offering the priorities and
reviewing the results each two- or four-week iteration, rather than
delegating development decisions to a project manager. It is
important to note that in Scrum there is one and only one person who
serves as and has the final authority of Product Owner. In multiteam programs, this one Product Owner may delegate the work to
Product Owners that represent him or her on subordinate teams, but
all decisions and direction come from the top-level, single Product
Owner.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

14

The Team
The Team builds the product that the customer is going to
use: the application or website, for example. The team in
Scrum is cross-functional and includes all the expertise
necessary to deliver the potentially shippable product each
Sprint. It is also self-organizing (self-managing), with a very
high degree of autonomy and accountability.
Hence, there is no team manager or project manager in Scrum.
Instead, the Team members decide what to commit to, and how
best to accomplish that commitment. The Team is selforganizing.
Dedicated team
The Team in Scrum is seven plus or minus two
people. For a software product the Team might include
programmers, interface designers, and testers. The
Team develops the product and provides ideas to
the Product Owner about how to make the
product great. In my experience, it is essential
that the Team is 100 percent dedicated to the
work for one product during the Sprint;
multitasking across multiple products or projects
will severely limit performance. Stable Teams are
associated with higher productivity, so changing
team members should also be avoided.
Application groups with many people are
organized into multiple Scrum teams, each
focused on different features for the product, with
close coordination of their efforts. Since one Team
does all the work (planning, analysis, programming,
and test) for a complete customer-centric feature,

15

Scrum teams are also known as feature teams. In very technically

complex programs and products, Ive seen Teams organized by
architectural layer - such as when product family architectures are
employed. However, integration prior to the end of the Sprint is more
difficult when Teams are so structured.

The Scrum Master

The ScrumMaster helps the product group learn and apply
Scrum to achieve business value. The ScrumMaster does
whatever is in their power to help the team be successful.
The ScrumMaster is not the manager of the team or a project
manager; instead, the ScrumMaster serves the team, protects them
from outside interference, and educates and guides the Product
Owner and the team in the skillful use of Scrum. The ScrumMaster
makes sure everyone on the team (including the Product Owner, and
those in management) understands and follows the practices of
Scrum. They also help lead the organization through the often
difficult change required to achieve success with agile development.
Commitment is important
Since Scrum makes visible many impediments and threats to the
teams and Product Owners effectiveness, it is important to have an
engaged ScrumMaster working energetically to help resolve those
issues. If not, the team or Product Owner will find it difficult to
succeed. Scrum teams should have a dedicated full-time
ScrumMaster, although a smaller team might have a team member
play this role (carrying a lighter load of regular work when they do
so). Great ScrumMasters can come from any background or
discipline: Engineering, Design, Testing, Product Management,
Project Management, or Quality Management.
The ScrumMaster and the Product Owner cannot be the same
individual; at times, the ScrumMaster may be called upon to push
back on the Product Owner (for example, if they try to introduce new
deliverables in the middle of a Sprint). And unlike a project manager,
the ScrumMaster does not tell people what to do or assign tasks
they facilitate the process, supporting the team as it organizes and
manages itself. If the ScrumMaster was previously in a position

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

16

managing the team, they will need to significantly change their

mindset and style of interaction for the team to be successful with
Scrum. In the case that an ex-manager transitions to the role of
ScrumMaster, it is best to serve a team other than the one that
previously reported to the manager, otherwise the social or power
dynamics are in potential conflict.

What About the Managers?

Note that there is no role of project manager in Scrum. Sometimes an
(ex-) project manager can step into the role of ScrumMaster, but this
has a mixed record of success there is a fundamental difference
between the two roles, both in day-to-day responsibilities and in the
mindset required to be successful.
In addition to the three Scrum roles, there are other contributors to the
success of the product, including managers. While their role changes,
they remain valuable. For example:
they create a business model that works and provide resources the
team needs
they support the team by respecting the rules and spirit of Scrum
they help remove impediments that the team identifies
they make their expertise and experience available to the team
they challenge the team to move beyond mediocrity
In Scrum, these individuals replace the time they previously spent
playing the role of nanny (assigning tasks, getting status reports, and
other forms of micromanagement) with time as guru and servant of
the team (mentoring, coaching, helping remove obstacles, helping
problem-solve, providing creative input, and guiding the skills
development of team members). In this shift, managers may need to
change their management style; for example, using Socratic questioning
to help the team discover the solution to a problem, rather than simply
deciding a solution and assigning it to the team.
I refer you to a paper from Peter Deemer, a colleague of mine at Scrum
Training Institute, for more ideas on the transition from traditional
management structures to a Scrum management structure.

17

CHAPTER 3

Getting Started
Initiating a Scrum project is not hard, as long as one takes one
step at a time, and makes sure that everyone feels included.

The Product Backlog

The first step in Scrum is for the Product Owner to articulate the
product vision. Eventually, this evolves into a refined and prioritized
list of features called the Product Backlog.
This backlog exists and evolves over the lifetime of the product; it
is the product road map. At any point, the Product Backlog is the
single, definitive view of everything that could be done by the team
ever, in order of priority. Only a single Product Backlog exists; this
means the Product Owner is required to make prioritization decisions
across the entire spectrum.
The Product Backlog includes a variety of items, primarily new
customer features (enable all users to place book in shopping
cart), but also engineering improvement goals (rework the
transaction processing module to make it scalable), exploratory or

The Product Backlog leads the way ahead for the Scrum Team. It is maintained by the Product Owner.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

18

How Much Detail?

One of the myths about Scrum is that
it prevents you from writing detailed
specifications; in reality, it is up to
the Product Owner and Team to
decide how much detail is required,
and this will vary from one backlog
item to the next, depending on the
insight of the team, and other
factors. State what is important in
the least amount of space necessary
in other words, do not describe every
possible detail of an item, just make
clear what is necessary for it to be
understood. Low priority items,
which are likely to be implemented
at a later stage and are usually
coarsegrained, have fewer
requirement details. High priority
and fine-grained items that will
soon be implemented tend to have
more detail. For more on structuring
Product Backlog, a study of lean
thinking, particularly lean inventory
and just-in-time order processing,
will prove instructional.

research work (investigate solutions for speeding up credit card

validation), performance and security requirements, and, possibly,
known defects (diagnose and fix the order processing script
errors), if there are only a few problems. (A system with many
defects usually has a separate defect tracking system.) Many people
like to articulate the requirements in terms of user stories - concise,
clear descriptions of the functionality in terms of its value to the end
user of the product. In more demanding environments, such as FDA
life critical applications, Use Cases are often used.
The subset of the Product Backlog that is intended for the current
release is known as the Release Backlog, and in general, this portion
is the primary focus of the Product Owner.
The Product Backlog is continuously updated by the Product
Owner to reflect changes in the needs of the customer, new ideas or
insights, moves by the competition, technical hurdles that appear,
and so forth. The team provides the Product Owner with estimates of
the effort required for each item on the Product Backlog. In addition,
the Product Owner is responsible for assigning a business value
estimate to each individual item. This is usually an unfamiliar
practice for a Product Owner. As such, it is something a
ScrumMaster may help the Product Owner learn to do. With these
two estimates (effort and value) and perhaps with additional risk
estimates, the Product Owner prioritizes the backlog (actually,
usually just the Release Backlog subset) to maximize ROI (choosing
items of high value with low effort) or secondarily, to reduce some
major risk. As will be seen, these effort and value estimates may be
refreshed each Sprint as people learn; consequently, this is a
continuous re-prioritization activity and the Product Backlog is everevolving.
Scrum does not mandate the form of estimates in the Product
Backlog, but it is common to use relative estimates expressed as
points rather than absolute units of effort such as person-weeks.
Over time, a team tracks how many relative points they implement
each Sprint; for example, averaging 26 points per Sprint. With this
information they can project a release date to complete all features,
or how many features will likely be completed by a date. Standard
deviations around the average points will indicate least likely and
most likely possibilities.The points completed per Sprint is called the

19

velocity of the team. A realeastic release plan is always based on the

velocity of the team.
The items in the Product Backlog can vary significantly in size or
effort. Larger ones are broken into smaller items during the Product
Backlog Refinement workshop or the Sprint Planning Meeting, and
smaller ones may be consolidated.

Sprint Planning
At the beginning of each Sprint, the Sprint Planning Meeting takes
place. It is divided into two distinct sub-meetings, the first of which
is called Sprint Planning Part One.
In Sprint Planning Part One, the Product Owner and Team (with
facilitation from the ScrumMaster) review the high-priority items in
the Product Backlog that the Product Owner is interested in
implementing this Sprint. They discuss the goals and context for
these high-priority items on the Product Backlog, providing the Team
with insight into the Product Owners thinking. The Product Owner
and Team also review the Definition of Done that all items must
meet, such as, Done means coded to standards, reviewed,
implemented with unit test-driven development (TDD), tested with
100 percent test automation, integrated, and documented. This
definition of done ensures transparency and quality fit for the
purpose of the product and organization.
Part One focuses on understanding what the Product Owner
wants. According to the rules of Scrum, at the end of Part One the
(always busy) Product Owner may leave although they must be
available (for example, by phone) during the next meeting. However,
they are welcome to attend Part Two...
Sprint Planning Part Two focuses on detailed task planning for
how to implement the items that the team decides to take on. The
Team selects the items from the Product Backlog they commit to
complete by the end of the Sprint, starting at the top of the Product
Backlog (in others words, starting with the items that are the highest
priority for the Product Owner) and working down the list in order.
While the Product Owner does not have control over how much
the team commits to, he or she knows that the items the team is
committing to are drawn from the top of the Product Backlog in
other words, the items that he or she has rated as most important. The
Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

Team Planning
A key practice in Scrum is that the
team decides how much work they will
commit to complete, rather than
having it assigned to them by the
Product Owner. This makes for a more
reliable commitment because the team
is making it based on their own
analysis and planning, rather than
having it made for them by someone
else.

20

Example of how the available hours can be estimated.

One Item at a Time

During task generation and estimation
in Sprint Planning it is not necessary
nor appropriate for Team members to
volunteer for all the tasks they can do
best. Rather, it is better to only
volunteer for one task at a time, when
it is time to pick up a new task and to
consider deliberately choosing tasks
that will involve learning (perhaps by
pair work with a specialist).

go to where the work is

team has the authority to also select items from further down the list
in consultation with the Product Owner; this usually happens when
the team and Product Owner realize that something of lower priority
fits easily and appropriately with the high priority items.
The Sprint Planning Meeting should be timeboxed to four hours
for a four-week Sprint and two hours for a two-week Sprint. In order
to do this, the team must help the Product Owner by estimating the
size of stores before the Sprint Planning meeting the team is
making a serious commitment to complete the work, and this
commitment requires careful thought to be successful. A Team bases
its commitments on its past velocities. If a Team is new, new to the
technology or domain, it may not have reliable, stable velocities until
it has worked together for three or four Sprints. In making its
commitment, the Team factors in any vacations, new organizational
demands, and other items that may reduce its past velocity.
Once the Team capacity available is determined, the Team starts
with the first item on the Product Backlog in other words, the
Product Owners highest priority item and working together,
breaks it down into individual tasks, which are recorded in a
21

document called the Sprint Backlog (see below). As mentioned, the

Product Owner must be available during Part Two (such as via the
phone) so that clarifications and decisions regarding alternative
approaches is possible. The team will move sequentially down the
Product Backlog in this way, until its used up all its capacity. At the
end of the meeting, the team will have produced a list of tasks with
estimates (typically in hours or fractions of a day). The list is a
starting point, but more tasks will emerge as the Team addresses each
Product Backlog item during the Sprint. The Team will work on a
technical design that will be implemented using Sprint Backlog
tasks. The team choses the ordering of Sprint Backlog tasks to
maximize the velocity of production and quality of done
functionality.
Scrum encourages multi-skilled workers, rather than only
working to job title such as a tester only doing testing. In other
words, team members go to where the work is and help out as
possible. If there are many testing tasks, then all Team members may
help. This does not imply that everyone is a generalist; no doubt
some people are especially skilled in testing (and so on) but Team

No Changing Goals
There are powerful, positive factors
that arise from the team being
protected from changing goals during
the Sprint:
First, the team gets to work knowing
with absolute certainty that its
commitments will not change, thus
reinforcing the teams focus on
ensuring completion.
Second, it disciplines the Product
Owner into really thinking through the
items he or she prioritizes on the
Product Backlog and offers to the team
for the Sprint.

An example of a Sprint Backlog.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

22

Many teams also make use of a visual task-tracking tool, in the form of a wall-sized task board
where tasks (written on Post-It Notes) migrate during the Sprint across columns labeled
Not Yet Started, In Progress, and Done.

members work together and learn new skills from each other. Pairing
has proven a valuable approach to sharing knowledge.
All that said, there are rare times when a Team member may do a
particular task because it would take far too long or be impossible for
others to learn perhaps he or she is the only person with any artistic
skill to draw pictures. Other Team members could not draw a stick
man if their life depended on it. In this rare case and if it is not
rare and not getting rarer as the Team learns, there is something
wrong it may be necessary to ask if the total planned drawing tasks
that must be done by this certain Team member are feasible within
the short Sprint.
One of the pillars of Scrum is that once the Team makes its
commitment, any additions or changes must be deferred until the
next Sprint. This means that if halfway through the Sprint the
Product Owner decides there is a new item he or she would like the
Team to work on, he cannot make the change until the start of the
next Sprint. If an external circumstance appears that significantly
changes priorities, and means the Team would be wasting its time if
it continued working, the Product Owner or the team can terminate

23

the Sprint. The Team stops, and a new Sprint Planning meeting
initiates a new Sprint. The disruption of doing this is usually great;
this serves as a disincentive for the Product Owner or team to resort
to this dramatic decision.
By following these Scrum rules the Product Owner gains two
things. First, he or she has the confidence of knowing the Team has
made a commitment to complete a realistic and clear set of tasks they
have chosen. Over time a Team can become quite skilled at choosing
and delivering on a realistic commitment. Second, the Product
Owner gets to make whatever changes he or she likes to the Product
Backlog before the start of the next Sprint. At that point, additions,
deletions, modifications, and re-prioritizations are all possible and
acceptable. While the Product Owner is not able to make changes to
the selected items under development during the current Sprint, he or
she is only one Sprints duration or less away from making any
changes. Gone is the stigma around change change of direction,
change of requirements, or just plain changing your mind and it
may be for this reason that Product Owners are usually as
enthusiastic about Scrum as anyone.

Daily Scrum
Once the Sprint has started, the Team engages in another of the key
Scrum practices: The Daily Scrum. This is a short (15 minutes or
less) meeting that happens every workday at an appointed time and
place. Everyone on the Team attends. To keep it brief, it is
recommended that everyone remain standing. It is the Teams
opportunity to report to each other and inspect each others progress
and obstacles. In the Daily Scrum, one by one, each member of the
team reports three (and only three) things to the other members of
the team: (1) What they were able to get done since the last meeting;
(2) what they are planning to finish by the next meeting; and (3) any
blocks or impediments that are in their way. Note that the Daily
Scrum is not a status meeting to report to a manager; it is a time for a
self-organizing Team to share with each other what is going on, to
help it coordinate its work and optimize its likelihood of meeting its
commitments. Someone makes note of the blocks, and the
ScrumMaster is responsible for helping team members resolve them.
There is no discussion during the Daily Scrum, only reporting

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

24

Daily Updates of Work Remaining on the Sprint Backlog

60
New estimate of work remaining

burndown line
50
current estimate of
work remaining for
the team

40
30
20

idealized line

10
0

10

Days

Sprint Burndown Chart. While the Sprint Burndown chart can be created and displayed using a spreadsheet,
many teams find it is more effective to show it on paper on a wall in their workspace, with updates in pen;
this low-tech/high-touch solution is fast, simple, and often more visible than a computer chart.

25

answers to the three questions; if discussion is required it takes place

immediately after the Daily Scrum in a follow-up meeting, although
in Scrum no one is required to attend this. This follow-up meeting is
a common event where the Team adapts to the information they
heard in the Daily Scrum: in other words, another inspect and adapt
cycle. It is generally recommended not to have managers or others in
positions of perceived authority attend the Daily Scrum. This risks
making the Team feel monitored under pressure to report major
progress every day (an unrealistic expectation), and inhibited about
reporting problems and it tends to undermine the Teams selfmanagement, and invite micromanagement. It would be more useful
for a stakeholder to instead reach out to the team following the
meeting, and offer to help with any blocks that are slowing the
Teams progress.

How much work remains in the

future?

Updating Sprint Backlog & Sprint Burndown

Chart
Every day, the Team members update their estimate of the amount of
time remaining to complete their current task in the Sprint Backlog.
Following this update, someone adds up the hours remaining for the
Team as a whole, and plots it on the Sprint Burndown Chart. This
graph shows, each day, a new estimate of how much work (measured
in person hours or relative points) remains until the Teams tasks are
finished. Ideally, this is a downward sloping graph that is on a
trajectory to reach zero effort remaining by the last day of the
Sprint. Hence it is called a burndown chart. And while sometimes it
looks good, often it does not; this is the reality of product
development. The important thing is that it shows the Team their
progress towards their goal, not in terms of how much time was
spent in the past (an irrelevant fact in terms of progress), but in terms
of how much work remains in the future what separates the Team
from their goal. If the burndown line is not tracking downwards
towards completion by mid-Sprint, the team needs to execute the
Scrum Emergency Procedure:
1. Change the approach to the work or remove impediments to
increase velocity.
2. Get help by having someone outside the team take some of the
backlog.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

26

3. Reduce the scope of work.

4. Abort the Sprint.
It is important that the ScrumMaster coach the Team to take action
early rather than drifting into Sprint failure. Some ScrumMasters
insist that a Team reduce its commitments in early Sprints.
Successful Teams consistently improve by building on success.
Failing Teams stay stuck at low velocity.
to achieve a rhythm for the
work; this is often referred
to as the heartbeat of the
team in Scrum

Product Backlog Refinement

One of the lesser known, but valuable, guidelines in Scrum is that
five or ten percent of each Sprint must be dedicated by the Product
Owner and the team to refining (or grooming) the Product
Backlog. This includes
detailed requirements analysis
splitting large items into smaller ones
estimation of new items
and re-estimation of existing items.
A regularly scheduled Weekly meeting with the Product Owner is
enough for experienced Teams to groom the Product Backlog. This
refinement activity is not for items selected for the current Sprint; it
is for items for the future, most likely in the next one or two Sprints.
With this practice, Sprint Planning becomes relatively simple
because the Product Owner and Scrum Team start the planning with
a clear, well-analyzed and carefully estimated set of items. A sign
that this refinement process is not being done (or not being done
well) is that Sprint Planning involves significant questions,
discovery, or confusion.

Ending the Sprint

One of the core tenets of Scrum is that the duration of the Sprint is
never extended it ends on the assigned date regardless of whether
the Team has completed the work it committed to. Teams typically
over-commit in the first few Sprints and fail to meet objectives.
Teams might then overcompensate and under-commit, and finish
early. But by the third or fourth Sprint, a Team typically has figured
out what it are capable of delivering (most of the time), and it will
meet its Sprint goals more reliably after that. Teams are encouraged

27

to pick one duration for Sprints (say, two weeks) and not change it. A
consistent duration helps the Team learn how much it can
accomplish, which helps in both estimation and longer-term release
planning. It also helps the Team achieve a rhythm for their work; this
is often referred to as the heartbeat of the team in Scrum.

Sprint Review
After the Sprint ends, there is the Sprint Review, where the team
reviews the Sprint with the Product Owner. This is often mislabeled
the demo but that does not capture the real intent of this meeting.
A key idea in Scrum is inspect and adapt. To see and learn what is
going on and then evolve based on feedback, in repeating cycles. The
Sprint Review is an inspect and adapt activity for the product. It is a
time for the Product Owner and key stake-holders to learn what is
going on with the product and with the Team (that is, a review of the
Sprint); and for the Team to learn what is going on with the Product
Owner and the market. Consequently, the most important element of
the Review is an in-depth conversation and collaboration between
the Team and Product Owner to learn the situation, to get advice, and
so forth. The review includes a demo of what the Team built during
the Sprint, but if the focus of the review is a demo rather than
conversation, there is an imbalance.
Present at this meeting are the Product Owner, Team members,
and ScrumMaster, plus customers, stakeholders, experts, executives,
and anyone else interested. The demo portion of the Sprint Review is
not a presentation the team gives there is no slideware. A
guideline in Scrum is that as little time as possible should be spent on
preparing for the Sprint Review; Scrum suggests no more than 2
hours. It is simply a demo of what has been built. Anyone present is
free to ask questions and give input.

The Sprint Retrospective

A simple way to structure the Sprint
Retrospective is to draw four columns
on a whiteboard, labeled
What went well?
What could have been better?
Things to try?
Issues to escalate?
and then go around the room, with
each person adding one or more items
to the lists. As items are repeated,
check marks are added next to them,
so the common items become clear.
Then the team looks for underlying
causes, and agrees on a small number
of changes to try in the upcoming
Sprint, along with a commitment to
review the results at the next Sprint
Retrospective.
A useful practice at the end of the
Retrospective is for the team to label
each of the items in each column with
either a C if it is caused by Scrum (in
other words, without Scrum it would
not be happening), or an E if it is
exposed by Scrum (in other words, it
would be happening with or without
Scrum, but Scrum makes it known to
the team), or a U if its unrelated to
Scrum (like the weather). The team
may find a lot of Cs on the Whats
Working Well side of the board, and a
lot of Es on the What Could Work
Better ; this is good news, even if the
What Could Work Better list is a long
one, because the first step to solving
underlying issues is making them
visible, and Scrum is a powerful
catalyst for that.

Sprint Retrospective
The Sprint Review involves inspect and adapt regarding the product.
The Sprint Retrospective, which follows the Review, involves
inspect and adapt regarding the process. This is a practice that some
teams skip which is unacceptable, because self-organization requires
the frequent regular reflection provided by the Retrospective. Its the

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

28

Release Backlog (a subset of the Product Backlog).

Release Burndown Chart.

29

main mechanism for taking the visibility that Scrum provides into
areas of potential improvement, and turning it into results. Its an
opportunity for the entire ScrumTeam to discuss whats working and
whats not working, and agree on changes to try. Sometimes the
ScrumMaster can act as an effective facilitator for the retrospective,
but it may be better to find a neutral outsider to facilitate the
meeting; a good approach is for ScrumMasters to facilitate each
others retrospectives, which enables cross-pollination among teams.

Updating Release Backlog & Burndown Chart

At this point, some items have been finished, some have been added,
some have new estimates, and some have been dropped from the
release goal. The Product Owner is responsible for ensuring that
these changes are reflected in the Release Backlog (and more
broadly, the Product Backlog). In addition, Scrum includes a Release
Burndown chart that shows progress towards the release date. It is
analogous to the Sprint Burndown chart, but is at the higher level of
items (requirements) rather than fine-grained tasks. Since a new
Product Owner is unlikely to know why or how to create this chart,
this is another opportunity for a ScrumMaster to help the Product
Owner.

Is a Release Sprint needed?

Note that the need for a Release Sprint
is a sign of some weakness; the ideal is
that it is not required. When
necessary, Sprints continue until the
Product Owner decides the product is
almost ready for release, at which
point there will be a Release Sprint to
prepare for launch. If the team has
followed good development practices,
with continuous refactoring and
integration, and effective testing
during each Sprint, there should be
little pre-release stabilization or other
wrap-up work required.

Starting the Next Sprint

Following the Sprint Review, the Product Owner may update the
Product Backlog with any new insights. At this point, the Product
Owner and Team are ready to begin another Sprint cycle. There is no
down time between Sprints teams normally go from a Sprint
Retrospective one afternoon into the next Sprint Planning the
following morning (or after the weekend).
One of the principles of agile development is sustainable pace,
and only by working regular hours at a reasonable level can teams
continue this cycle indefinitely.

Release Sprint
The perfection vision of Scrum is that the product is potentially
shippable at the end of each Sprint, which implies there is no wrap
up work required, such as testing or documentation. Rather, the

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

30

Change Thyself!
One common mistake teams make,
when presented with a Scrum practice
that challenges them, is to change
Scrum, not change themselves. For
example, teams that have trouble
delivering on their Sprint commitment
might decide to make the Sprint
duration extendable, so they never run
out of time and in the process,
ensure they never have to learn how to
do a better job of estimating and
managing their time. In this way,
without coaching and the support of an
experienced ScrumMaster,
organizations can mutate Scrum into
just a mirror image of its own
weaknesses and dysfunction, and
undermine the real benefit that Scrum
offers: making visible the good and the
bad, and giving the organization the
choice of elevating itself to a higher
level.

implication is that everything is completely finished every Sprint;

that you could actually ship it or deploy it immediately after the
Sprint Review.
However, many organizations have weak development practices
and cannot achieve this perfection, or there are other extenuating
circumstances (such as, the machine broke). In this case, there will
be some remaining work, such as final production environment
integration testing, and so there will be the need for a Release
Sprint to handle this remaining work. A goal of any Scrum Team is
to minimize the number of Release Sprints for completing undone
work. Undone work tends to accumulate exponentially and causes
poor product quality.

Release Planning & Initial Product Backlog

Refinement
A question that is sometimes asked is how, in an iterative model, can
long-term release planning be done. There are two cases to consider:
(1) a new product in its first release, and (2) an existing product in a
later release.
In the case of a new product, or an existing product just adopting
Scrum, there is the need to do initial Product Backlog refinement
before the first Sprint, where the Product Owner and team shape a
proper Scrum Product Backlog. This could take a few days or a
week, and involves a vision workshop, some detailed requirements
analysis, and estimation of all the items identified for the first
release.
Surprisingly in Scrum, in the case of an established product with
an established Product Backlog, there should not be the need for any
special or extensive release planning for the next release. Why?
Because the Product Owner and team should be doing Product
Backlog refinement every Sprint (five or ten percent of each Sprint),
continuously preparing for the future. This continuous product
development mode obviates the need for the dramatic punctuated
prepare-execute-conclude stages one sees in traditional sequential
life cycle development.
During an initial Product Backlog refinement workshop and
during the continuous backlog refinement each Sprint, the Team and
31

Product Owner will do release planning, refining the estimates,

priorities, and content as they learn.
Some releases are date-driven; for example: We will release
version 2.0 of our project at a trade-show on November 10. In this
situation, the team will complete as many Sprints (and build as many
features) as is possible in the time available. Other products require
certain features to be built before they can be called complete and the
product will not launch until these requirements are satisfied,
however long that takes. Since Scrum emphasizes producing
potentially shippable code each Sprint, the Product Owner may
choose to start doing interim releases, to allow the customer to reap
the benefits of completed work sooner.
Since they cannot possibly know everything up front, the focus is
on creating and refining a plan to give the release broad direction,
and clarify how tradeoff decisions will be made (scope versus
schedule, for example). Think of this as the roadmap guiding you
towards your final destination; which exact roads you take and the
decisions you make during the journey may be determined en route.
Most Product Owners choose one release approach. For example,
they will decide a release date, and will work with the team to
estimate the Release Backlog items that can be completed by that
date. In situations where a fixed price / fixed date / fixed
deliverable commitment is required for example, contract
development one or more of those parameters must have a built-in
buffer to allow for uncertainty and change; in this respect, Scrum is
no different from other approaches. The advantage of Scrum is that
new requirements can easily be added into the release at sprint
boundaries as long as low prority requirements scheduled later can
be removed and still keep the project on time and on budget.

Dont impose Scrum on the Team

Something to be wary of is managers
imposing Scrum on their teams; Scrum
is about giving a team space and tools
to manage themselves, and having this
dictated from above is not a recipe for
success.
A better approach might begin with a
team learning about Scrum from a peer
or manager, getting comprehensively
educated in professional training, and
then making a decision as a team to
follow the practices faithfully for a
defined period; at the end of that
period, the team will evaluate its
experience, and decide whether to
continue.
The good news is that while the first
Sprint is usually very challenging to the
team, the benefits of Scrum tend to be
visible by the end of it, leading many
new Scrum teams to exclaim: Scrum
is hard, but it sure is a whole lot
better than what we were doing
before!

Scrum is hard, but it sure is a

whole lot better than what we
were doing before!

Application or Product Focus

For applications or products either for the market or for internal
use within an organization Scrum moves groups away from the
older project-centric model toward a continuous application/product
development model. There is no longer a project with a beginning,
middle, and end. And hence no traditional project manager. Rather,
there is simply a stable Product Owner and a long-lived selfmanaging Team that collaborate in an endless series of two- or

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

32

four-week Sprints, until the product or application is retired. All

necessary project management work is handled by the Team and
the business ownerwho is an internal business customer or from
Product Management. It is not managed by an IT manager or
someone from a Project Management Office.
Scrum can also be used for true projects that are one-time
initiatives (rather than work to create or evolve long-lived
applications); still, in this case the team and Product Owner do the
project management.
What if there is insufficient new work from one or more existing
applications to warrant a dedicated long-lived Team for each
application? In this case, a stable long-lived Team may take on items
from one application in one Sprint, and then items from another in
the next Sprint; in this situation the Sprints are often quite short, such
as one week.
Occasionally, there is insufficient new work even for this last
solution, and the Team may take on items from several applications
during the same Sprint; however, beware this solution as it may
devolve into unproductive multitasking across multiple applications.
A basic productivity theme in Scrum is for the Team to be focused on
one product or application for one Sprint.

Common Challenges
Scrum is not only a concrete set of practices rather, and more
importantly, it is a framework that provides visibility to the Team,
and a mechanism that allows them to inspect and adapt
accordingly. Scrum works by making visible the dysfunction and
impediments that are impacting the Product Owner and the Teams
effectiveness, so that they can be addressed. For example, the
Product Owner may not really know the market, the features, or how
to estimate their relative business value. Or the Team may be
unskilled in effort estimation or development work.
The Scrum framework will quickly reveal these weaknesses.
Scrum does not solve the problems of development; it makes them
painfully visible, and provides a framework for people to explore
ways to resolve problems in short cycles and with small
improvement experiments.

33

Suppose the team fails to deliver what they committed to in the first
Sprint due to poor task analysis and estimation skill. To the team, this
feels like failure. But in reality, this experience is the necessary first
step toward becoming more realistic and thoughtful about their
commitments. This pattern of Scrum helping make visible
dysfunction, enabling the team to do something about it is the basic
mechanism that produces the most significant benefits that teams
using Scrum experience.
Another common mistake is to assume that a practice is
discouraged or prohibited just because Scrum does not specifically
require it. For example, Scrum does not require the Product Owner to
set a long-term strategy for his or her product; nor does it require
engineers to seek advice from more experienced engineers about
complex technical problems. Scrum leaves it to the individuals
involved to make the right decision; and in most cases, both of these
practices (along with many others) are well advised.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

34

Distributed, Outsourced Scrum

U.S., European, or Japanese companies often outsource
software development to Eastern Europe, Russia, or the
Far East. Typically, remote teams operate independently
and communication problems limit productivity. While
there is a large amount of published research on project
management, distributed development, and outsourcing
strategies as isolated domains, there are few detailed
studies of best project management practices on large
systems that are both distributed and outsourced.
Distributed Team Models
Here we consider three distributed Scrum models
commonly observed in practice:
Isolated Scrums - Teams are isolated across
geographies. In most cases off-shore teams are not crossfunctional and may not be using the Scrum process.
Distributed Scrum of Scrums Scrum teams are isolated
across geographies and integrated by a Scrum of Scrums
that meets regularly across geographies.
Totally Integrated Scrums Scrum teams are crossfunctional with members distributed across geographies.
In the SirsiDynix case (see chapter 5), the Scrum of
Scrums was localized with all ScrumMasters in Utah.
Most outsourced development efforts use a degenerative
form of the Isolated Scrums model where outsourced
teams are not cross-functional and not Agile.
Requirements may be created in the U.S. and developed

in Dubai, or development may occur in Germany and

quality assurance in India. Typically, cross-cultural
communication problems are compounded by differences
in work style in the primary organization vs. the
outsourced group. In the worst case, outsourced teams
are not using Scrum and their productivity is typical of
waterfall projects further delayed by cross-continent
communications lag time.
Best practice recommended by the Scrum Alliance is a
Distributed Scrum of Scrums model. This model partitions
work across cross-functional, isolated Scrum teams while
eliminating most dependencies between teams. Scrum
teams are linked by a Scrum-of-Scrums where
ScrumMasters (team leaders/project managers) meet
regularly across locations. This encourages
communication, cooperation, and cross-fertilization and
is appropriate for newcomers to Agile development.
An Integrated Scrums model has all teams fully
distributed and each team has members at multiple
locations. While this appears to create communication
and coordination burdens, the daily Scrum meetings help
to break down cultural barriers and disparities in work
styles. On large enterprise implementations, it can
organize the project into a single whole with an
integrated global code base. Proper implementation of
this approach provides location transparency and
performance characteristics similar to small co-located

Strategies for distributed Scrum teams (adapted from Takeuchi and Nonaka).

35

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

36

Part II

Scrum At Work

37

CHAPTER 4

Scrum cases
This chapter serves as a retrospective on the origins of Scrum, its
evolution in different companies, and a few key learnings along
the way. It will provide a reference point for further investigation
and implementation of Scrum.

Case 1: Easel Corporation

The First Scrum

Scrum was started in 1993 for software teams at Easel Corporation,
where Jeff Sutherland was VP of object technology hired as chief
engineer to lead a small team developing the first object-oriented
design and analysis tool that incorporated round-trip engineering and
automated object-relational mapping in enterprise development.

Wicked Problems, Righteous

Solutions: A Catolog of Modern
Engineering Paradigms

Peter DeGrace & Leslie Hulet Stahl

Yourdon Press Series
ISBN: 013590126X

There were some key factors that influenced the introduction of

Scrum at Easel Corporation. The book Wicked Problems, Righteous
Solutions by Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl reviewed the
reasons why the waterfall approach to software development does
not work for software development today. Requirements are not
fully understood before the project begins. The users know what
they want only after they see an initial version of the software.
Requirements change during the software construction process. And
new tools and technologies make implementation strategies
unpredictable. DeGrace and Stahl reviewed All-at-Once models of
software development, which uniquely fit object-oriented
implementation of software and help to resolve these challenges.
All-at-Once model
All-at-Once models of software development assume that the
creation of software is done by simultaneously working on
requirements, analysis, design, coding, and testing and then
delivering the entire system all at once. The simplest All-at-Once
model is a single super-programmer creating and delivering an
application from beginning to end. All aspects of the development
process reside in a single persons head. This is the fastest way to
deliver a product that has good internal architectural consistency, and
it is the hackers mode of implementation. The next level of
approach to All-at-Once development is handcuffing two
programmers together, as in the XP practice of pair programming.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

38

The team attained this level

of productivity by intensive
interaction in daily meetings
with project management,
product management,
developers, documenters, and
quality assurance staff.

Two developers deliver the entire system together. This is been

shown to deliver better code (in terms of usability, maintainability,
flexibility, and extendability) faster than work delivered by larger
teams. The challenge is to achieve a similar overall productivity
effect with an entire team and then with teams of teams.
Our team-based All-at-Once model was based on both the
Japanese approach to new product development, Sashimi, and
Scrum. We were already using production prototyping to build
software. It was implemented in slices (Sashimi) where an entire
piece of fully integrated functionality worked at the end of an
iteration. What intrigued us was Hirotaka Takeuchi and Hujiro
Nonakas description of the team-building process in setting up and
managing a Scrum. The idea of building a self-empowered team in
which everyone had a global view of the product on a daily basis
seemed like the right idea. This approach to managing the team,
which had been so successful at Honda, Canon, and Fujitsu,
resonated with the systems thinking approach being promoted by
Peter Senge at MIT.
We were also impacted by recent publications in computer
science. As I alluded above, Peter Wagner at Brown University
demonstrated that it was impossible to fully specify or test an
interactive system, which is designed to respond to external inputs
(Wegner's lemma). Here was mathematical proof that any process
that assumed known inputs, as does the waterfall method, was
doomed to failure when building an object-oriented system.
We were prodded into setting up the first Scrum meeting after
reading James Coplien's paper on Borland's development of Quattro
Pro for Windows. The Quattro team delivered one million lines of C
++ code in 31 months, with a four person staff growing to eight
people later in the project. This was about a thousand lines of
deliverable code per person per week, probably the most productive
project ever documented. The team attained this level of
productivity by intensive interaction in daily meetings with project
management, product management, developers, documenters, and
quality assurance staff.

39

Software Evolution and Punctuated Equilibrium

Our daily meetings at Easel were disciplined in a way that we now
understand as the Scrum pattern. The most interesting effect of
Scrum on Easel's development environment was an observed
"punctuated equilibrium effect." A fully integrated component
design environment leads to rapid evolution of a software system
with emergent, adaptive properties, resembling the process of
punctuated equilibrium observed in biological species.
By having every member of the team see every day what every
other team member was doing, we began to see how we could
accelerate each other's work. For instance, one developer
commented that if he changed a few lines in code, he could eliminate
days of work for another developer. This effect was so dramatic that
the project accelerated to the point where it had to be slowed down.
This hyperproductive state was seen in several subsequent Scrums,
but never went so dramatic as the one at Easel.
Achieving a Sustainable HyperProductive State
The key to entering a hyperproductive state was not just the Scrum
organizational pattern. It was a combination of:
The skill of the team
The flexibility of a Smalltalk development environment
The implementation of what are now know as XP engineering
practices
The way we systematically stimulated production prototypes
that rapidly evolved into a deliverable product.
Furthermore, in the hyperproductive state, the initial Scrum entered
what professional athletes and martial artists call "the zone." No
matter what happened or what problems arose, the response of the
team always was far better than the response of any individual. It
was reminiscent of the Celtics basketball team at their peak, when
they could do no wrong. The impact of entering the zone was not just
hyperproductivity. Peoples personal lives were changed. Team
members said they would never forget working on the project, and
they would always be looking for another experience like it. It
induced open, team-oriented, fun-loving behavior in unexpected
persons. Those individuals who could not function well in an open,
hyperproductive environment self-selected themselves out of the
team by finding other jobs. This reinforced positive team behavior
Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

40

Whats punctuated
equilibrium?
Evolutionary biologists have noticed
that change occurs sharply at intervals
separated by long periods of apparent
stagnation, leading to the concept of
punctuated equilibrium.
Computer simulations of this
phenomenon suggest that periods of
equilibrium are actually periods of
ongoing genetic change of an
organism. The effects of that change
are not apparent until several
subsystems evolve in parallel to the
point where they can work together to
produce a dramatic external effect.
This punctuated equilibrium effect has
been observed by teams working in a
component-based environment with
adequate business process engineering
tools, and the Scrum development
process accentuates the effect.

similar to biological systems, which select for fitness to the

environment, resulting in improved performance of individual
organisms.

Case 2: VMARK

The First Senior Management Scrum

When Easel Corporation was acquired by VMARK (subsequenctly
Informix, Ascension Software, and now IBM) the original Scrum
team continued its work on the same product. The VMARK senior
management team was intrigued by Scrum and asked Jeff Sutherland
to run a weekly senior management team Scrum to drive all the
companys products to the Internet.
These meetings started in 1995, and within a few months, the team
had caused the introduction of two new Internet products and
repositioned current products as Internet applications. Some
members of this team left VMARK to become innovators in
emerging Internet companies, so Scrum had an early impact on the
Internet.
It was also at VMARK that Ken Schwaber was introduced to
Scrum. Ken and I had worked together on and off for years. I showed
him Scrum and he agreed it worked better than other project
management approaches and was similar to how he built project
management software in his company. He quickly sold off the
project management software business and worked on bringing
Scrum to the software industry at large. His work has had an
incredible effect on deploying Scrum worldwide.

Case 3: Individual, Inc.

The First Internet Scrum

In the spring of 1996, Jeff Sutherland returned to Individual, Inc., a
company he co-founded as VP of Engineering in 1988. Much of the
Scrum experience at Individual has been documented by Ken
Schwaber.
The most impressive thing to me about Scrum at Individual was not
that the team delivered two new Internet products and multiple

41

releases of one of the products in a single quarter. It was the fact

that Scrum eliminated several hours a day of senior management
meeting time starting the day that Scrum began, within a week of my
arrival at the company.
Because Individual had just gone public at the beginning of the
Internet explosion, there were multiple competing priorities and
constant revision of market strategy. As a result, the development
team was constantly changing priorities and unable to deliver
product. The management team was meeting daily to determine
status of priorities that were viewed differently by every manager.
These meetings were eliminated and the Scrum meetings became the
focus for all decision making.
It was incredibly productive to force all decisions to occur in the
daily Scrum meeting. If anyone wanted to know the status of specific
project deliverables or wanted to influence any priority, he or she
could only do it in the daily Scrum meeting. I remember the senior
VP of marketing sat in on every meeting for a couple of weeks
sharing her desperate concern about meeting Internet deliverables
and timetables. The effect on the team was not to immediately
respond to her despair. Over a period of two weeks, the team selforganized around a plan to meet her priorities with achievable
technical delivery dates. When she agreed to the plan, she no longer
had to attend any Scrum meetings. The Scrum reported status on the
Web with green lights, yellow lights, and red lights for all pieces of
functionality. In this way, the entire company knew status in real
time, all the time. This transparency of information has become a key
characteristic of Scrum.

Case 4: IDX Systems

The First Scrum in the Large

During the summer of 1996, IDX Systems hired Jeff Sutherland as
senior VP of engineering and product development. IDX had over
4,000 customers and was one of the largest US healthcare software
companies, with hundreds of developers working on dozens of
products. Here was an opportunity to extend Scrum to large-scale
development.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

42

The approach at IDX was to turn the entire development group into
an interlocking set of Scrums. Every part of the organization was
team based including the management team, which included two
vice presidents, a senior architect, and several directors. Front-line
Scrums met daily. A Scrum of Scrums, which included the team
leaders of each Scrum in a product line, met weekly, The
management Scrum met monthly.
The key learning at IDX was that Scrum scales to any size. With
dozens of teams in operation, the most difficult problem was
ensuring the quality of the Scrum process in each team, particularly
when the entire organization had to learn Scrum all at once. IDX was
large enough to bring in productivity experts to monitor throughput
on every project. While most teams were only able to double the
industry average in function points per month delivered, several
teams moved into a hyperproductive state, producing deliverable
functionality at four to five times the industry average. These teams
became shining stars in the organization and examples for the rest of
the organization to follow.
One of the most productive teams at IDX was the Web Framework
team that built a web front-end infrastructure for all products. The
infrastructure was designed to host all IDX applications, as well as
seamlessly interoperate with end user or third party applications. It
was a distributed team with developers in Boston, Seattle, and
Vermont who met by teleconference in a daily Scrum meeting. The
geographic transparency of this model produced the same high
performance as co-located teams and has become the signature of
hyperproductive distributed/outsourced Scrums.
The innovation and quality of this teams work continued to be
demonstrated ten years later when IDX was acquired by GE
Healthcare. The web framework was selected as the standard for GE
applications.

Case 5: PatientKeeper Scrum

The First Scrum Company

In early 2000, Jeff Sutherland joined PatientKeeper, Inc. as chief
technology officer and began introducing Scrum into a startup

43

company. He was the 21st employee, and the development team

grew from a dozen people to 45 people in six months.
PatientKeeper deploys mobile devices in healthcare institutions to
capture and process financial and clinical data. Server technology
synchronizes the mobile devices and moves data to and from
multiple back-end legacy systems. A robust technical architecture
provides enterprise application integration to hospital and clinical
systems. Data is forward-deployed from these systems in a
PatientKeeper clinical repository. Server technologies migrate
changes from our clinical repository to a cache and then to data
storage on the mobile device. PatientKeeper proves that Scrum
works equally well across technology implementations.
The key learning at PatientKeeper involved the introduction of
eXtreme Programming techniques as a way to implement code
delivered by a Scrum organization. While all teams seem to find it
easy to implement a Scrum organizational process, they do not
always find it easy to introduce XP. We were able to do some team
programming and constant testing and refactoring, particularly as we
migrated all development to Java and XML. It was more difficult to
introduce these ideas when developers were working in C & C++.
After a year of Scrum meetings in all areas of development,
processes matured enough to capitalize on Scrum project
management techniques, which were fully automated.
Complete automation and transparency of data allowed
PatientKeeper to multithread Sprints through multiple teams. That in
combination with implementing a MetaScrum of senior stakeholders
in the company allowed PatientKeeper to run from top to bottom as a
Scrum and become the first Scrum company to enter the
hyperproductive state, delivering over 45 production releases a year
of a large enterprise software platform. This became the prototype
for the All-at-Once, or Type C Scrum, implemented in at least five
companies by 2006.
PatientKeeper was the first company to achieve a hyperproductive
revenue state driven by Scrum in 2007. Revenue quadrupled from
13M to 50M in one year.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

IEEE the Worlds Largest

Technical Professional
Organization
A non-profit organization,IEEE is the
world's leading professional association
for the advancement of technology.
The IEEE name was originally an
acronym for the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Today,
theorganization's scope of interest
hasexpanded into so many related
fields, that it is simplyreferred to by
the letters I-E-E-E (pronounced Eyetriple-E).
From www.iee.org

44

Results From a Scrum Project at

Yahoo!
How does Scrum work, compared to
the approach which was used
previously at the company?
Productivity: 68% of respondents
reported Scrum is better or much
better (4 or 5 on a 5-point scale); 5%
reported Scrum is worse or much worse
(1 or 2 on a 5-point scale); 27%
reported Scrum is about the same (3
on a 5-point scale).
Team Morale: 52% of respondents
reported Scrum is better or much
better; 9% reported Scrum is worse or
much worse; 39% reported Scrum is
about the same.
Adaptability: 63% of respondents
reported Scrum is better or much
better; 4% reported Scrum is worse or
much worse; 33% reported Scrum is
about the same.
Accountability: 62% of respondents
reported Scrum is better or much
better; 6% reported Scrum is worse or
much worse; 32% reported Scrum is
about the same.
Collaboration and Cooperation: 81%
of respondents reported Scrum is
better or much better; 1% reported
Scrum is worse or much worse; 18%
reported Scrum is about the same.
Team productivity increased on
average by 37%, based on the
estimates of the Product Owners.
86% of team-members stated that
they would continue using Scrum if the
decision were solely up to them.
(Based on a quarterly survey 2007,
including everyone at Yahoo! using
Scrum, i.e. Product Owners, Team
Members, ScrumMasters, and the
functional managers of those
individuals. )

Other Prominent Projects

One of the most interesting things about Scrum is the unique case
studies that have been published at IEEE conferences. Scrum is used
by some of the most productive, high maturity, and most profitable
software development teams in the world. Scrum powers:
The most productive large development project ever
documented (see next chapter).
The most unique CMMI Level 5 implementation on the planet.
The most profitable software development project in the history
of software development.

Systematic Software Engineering a unique CMMI

Level 5 implementation
Systematic Software Engineering in Aarhus, Denmark, spent seven
years and over 100,000 person hours of process engineers to achieve
CMMI Level 5 certification, reduce rework by 80%, and improve
productivity by 31%. Within six months after a Scrum Certification
course they had reduced planning time by 80%, defects by 40%, total
cost of a project by 50% while simultaneously enhancing customer
and employee satisfaction. They now bid Scrum projects at 50% of
the cost of waterfall projects.

Google AdWords the most profitable development

project in history
One of the most interesting Scrum projects is Googles AdWords
implementations. This application drives the majority of Google
revenue growth and helps create market capitalization that is higher
than Intel and just below that of Chevron, the most profitable oil
company in the world. The AdWords project, powered by Scrum, has
distributed teams in five locations and interfaces with virtually all
Google products on every release. As a result, the Google project
manager needed to insert more structure than is usually associated
with Google teams. His seamless introduction of Scrum based on
resolving the highest priority impediments observed by the teams
resulted in an implementation that no longer needed a ScrumMaster
to function. The teams ran by themselves.

45

CHAPTER 5

The SirsiDynix case

This case study summarizes an extraordinary distributed project
that ran smoothly across ten time zones.
It may seem improbable, but during the most productive Java project
ever documented, the 56 developers from SirsiDynix and StarSoft
Development Laboratories had an ocean and half a continent
between them. Working from Provo in Utah, Waterloo in Canada
and St. Petersburg in Russia, the distributed team delivered 671,688
lines of production Java code during 2005. In total, the Java
application consisted of over 1,000,000 lines of code. This proves
that a large, distributed, outsourced team actually can achieve a
hyperproductive state in this case 15.3 function points per
developer & month.
Best practices for distributed Scrum seen on this project consisted
of:
1. daily Scrum team meetings of all developers from multiple
sites
2. daily meetings of the Product Owner team
3. hourly automated builds from one central repository
4. no distinction between developers at different sites on the
same team
5. seamless integration of XP practices like pair programming
with Scrum

The companies
SirsiDynix has approximately 4,000 library and consortia clients,
serving over 200 million people through over 20,000 library outlets
in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
Jack Blount, President and CEO of Dynix and now CTO of the
merged SirsiDynix company, negotiated an outsource agreement
with StarSoft who staffed the project with over 20 qualified
engineers in 60 days. Significant development milestones were
completed in a few weeks and joint development projects are
efficiently tracked and continue to be on schedule.
StarSoft Development Labs, Inc. is a software outsourcing service
provider in Russia and Eastern Europe. Headquartered in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA, StarSoft operates development centers in St.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

46

Petersburg, Russia and Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, employing over

450 professionals. StarSoft has experience handling development
efforts varying in size and duration from just several engineers
working for a few months to large-scale projects involving dozens of
developers and spanning several years. StarSoft successfully uses
Agile development and particularly XP engineering practices to
maintain CMM Level 3 certification and was acquired by Exigen
Services in 2007.

A huge task at hand

SirsiDynix was confronted with the requirement to completely reimplement a legacy library system with over 12,500 installed sites.
Large teams working over many years in a changing business
environment faced many new requirements in the middle of the
project. To complicate matters further, the library software industry
was in a consolidating phase. Dynix started the project in 2002 and
merged with Sirsi in 2005 to form SirsiDynix.
Fortunately, Dynix started with a scalable Agile process that could
adapt to changing requirements throughout the project. Time to
market demanded more than doubling of output. That could only
happen by augmenting resources with Agile teams. StarSoft was
selected because of their history of successful XP implementations
and their experience with systems level software.
The combination of high risk, large scale, changing market
requirements, merger and acquisition business factors, and the
SirsiDynix experience with Scrum combined with StarSoft success
with XP led them to choose an Integrated Scrums implementation.
Jack Blount's past experience with Agile development projects at US
Data Authority, TeleComputing and JD Edwards where he had used
Isolated Scrums and Distributed Scrum of Scrums models did not
meet his expectations. This was a key factor in his decision to
structure the project as Integrated Scrums.
The Systems and Software Consortium (SSCI) has outlined
drivers, constraints, and enablers that force organizations to invest in
real-time project management information systems. Scalable Scrum
implementations with minimal tooling are one of the best real-time
information generators in the software industry.

47

SSCI complexity drivers are described as:

Increasing problem complexity shifting focus from requirements
to objective capabilities that must be met by larger teams and
strategic partnerships.
Increasing solution complexity which shifts attention from
platform architectures to enterprise architectures and fully
integrated systems.
Increasing technical complexity from integrating standalone
systems to integrating across layers and stacks of communications
and network architectures.
Increasing compliance complexity shifting from proprietary to
open standards.
Increasing team complexity shifting from a single implementer
to strategic teaming and mergers and acquisitions.
SirsiDynix faced all of these issues. Legacy products were
difficult to sell to new customers. They needed a new product with
complete functionality for the library enterprise based on new
technologies that were highly scalable, easily expandable, and used
the latest computer and library standards,

Top Issues in Distributed Development

The SSCI has carefully researched top issues in distributed
development, all of which had to be handled by SirsiDynix and
StarSoft.
Strategic: Difficulty leveraging available resources, best practices
are often deemed proprietary, are time consuming and difficult to
maintain.
Project and process management: Difficulty synchronizing
work between distributed sites.
Communication: Lack of effective communication mechanisms.
Cultural: Conflicting behaviors, processes, and technologies.
Technical: Incompatible data formats, schemas, and standards.
Security: Ensuring electronic transmission confidentiality and
privacy.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

48

The unique way in which SirsiDynix and StarSoft implemented an

Integrated Scrums model carefully addressed all of these issues.

Solution: Integrated Scrums

SirsiDynix used the three scrum roles Scrum Master, Product
Owner & Team to solve the strategic distribution problem of
building a high velocity, real-time reporting organization with an
open source process that is easy to implement and low-overhead to
maintain.
For large programs, a Chief ScrumMaster to run a Scrum of
Scrums and a Chief Product Owner to centrally manage a single
consolidated and prioritized product backlog is essential. SirsiDynix
located the Scrum of Scrums and the Product Owner teams in Utah.

Team Formation
The second major challenge for large projects is process
management, particularly synchronizing work between sites. This
was achieved by splitting teams across sites and fine tuning daily
Scrum meetings.
Teams at SirsiDynix were split across the functional areas needed
for an integrated library system. Half of a Scrum team is typically in
Provo, Utah, and the other half in St. Petersburg. There are usually
3-5 people on the Utah part of the team and 4 or more on the St.
Petersburg portion of the team. The Search and Reporting Teams are
smaller. There are smaller numbers of team members in Seattle,
Denver, St. Louis, and Waterloo, Canada.

Scrum Meetings
Teams meet across geographies at 7:45am Utah time which is 17:45
St. Petersburg time. Teams found it necessary to distribute answers to
the three Scrum questions in writing before the Scrum meeting. This
shortens the time needed for the join meeting teleconference and
helps overcome any language barriers. Each individual reports on
what they did since the last meeting, what they intend to do next, and
what impediments are blocking their progress.

49

Email exchange on the three questions before the daily Scrum

teleconference was used throughout the project to enable phone
meetings to proceed more smoothly and efficiently. These daily team
calls helped the people in Russia and the U.S. learn to understand
each other. In contrast, most outsourced development projects do not
hold formal daily calls and the communication bridge is never
formed.
Local sub-teams have an additional standup meeting at the
beginning of the day in St. Petersburg. Everyone uses the same
process and technologies and daily meetings coordinate activities
within the teams.
ScrumMasters are all in Provo, Utah or Waterloo, Canada, and
meet in a Scrum of Scrums every Monday morning. Here work is
coordinated across teams. Architects are directly allocated to
production Scrum teams and all located in Utah. An Architecture
group also meets on Monday after the Scrum of Scrums meeting and
controls the direction of the project architecture through the Scrum
meetings. A Product Owner resident in Utah is assigned to each
Scrum team. A chief Product Owner meets regularly with all Product
Owners to assure coordination of requirements.
SirsiDynix achieved strong central control of teams across
geographies by centrally locating ScrumMasters, Product Owners,
and Architects. This helped them get consistent performance across
distributed teams.

Sprints
Sprints are two weeks long on the SirsiDynix project. There is a
Sprint planning meeting similar to an XP release planning meeting in
which requirements from User Stories are broken down into
development tasks. Most tasks require a lot of questions from the
Product Owners and some tasks take more time than initial estimates.
The lag time for Utah Product Owner response to questions on
User Stories forces multitasking in St. Petersburg and this is not an
ideal situation. Sometimes new tasks are discovered after querying
Product Owners during the Sprint about feature details.
Code is feature complete and demoed at the end of each Sprint.
Up until 2006, if it met the Product Owners functional requirement,
it was considered done, although full testing was not completed. It

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

50

was not deliverable code until SirsiDynix strengthened its definition

of done to include all testing in 2006. Allowing work in progress to
cross Sprint boundaries introduces wait times and greater risk into
the project. It violates the lean principle of reducing work in progress
and increases rework.

Product Specifications
Requirements are in the form of User Stories used in many Scrum
and XP implementations. Some of them are lengthy and detailed,
others are not. A lot of questions result after receiving the document
in St. Petersburg which are resolved by daily Scrum meetings, instant
messaging, or email.
For this project, St. Petersburg staff like a detailed description
because the system is a comprehensive and complex system designed
for specialized librarians. As a result, there is a lot of knowledge that
needs to be embedded in the product specification.
The ways libraries work in St. Petersburg are very different than
English libraries. Russian libraries operate largely via manual
operations. While processes look similar to English libraries on the
surface, the underlying details are quite different. Therefore, user
stories do not have sufficient detail for Russian programmers.

51

Story for Simple Renewals Use Case:

Patron brings book or other item to staff to be renewed. Patron John Smith checked out "The
Da Vinci Code" the last time he was in the library. Today he is back in the library to pick up
something else and brings "The Da Vinci Code" with him. He hands it to the staff user and
asks for it to be renewed. The staff user simply scans the item barcode at checkout, and the
system treats it as a renewal since the item is already checked out to John. This changes the
loan period (extends the due date) for the length of the renewal loan. Item and patron
circulation history are updated with a new row showing the renewal date and new due date.
Counts display for the number of renewals used and remaining. The item is returned to
Patron John Smith.
Assumptions:
Item being renewed is currently checked out to the active patron
No requests or reservations outstanding
Item was not overdue
Item does not have a problem status (lost, etc)
No renew maximums have been reached
No block/circulation maximums have been reached
Patron's subscriptions are active and not within renewal period
No renewal charges apply
No recalls apply
Renewal is from Check Out (not Check In)
Staff User has renewal privileges
Verification (How to verify completion):
Launch Check Out
Retrieve a patron who has an item already checked out but not yet overdue
Enter barcode for checked out item into barcode entry area (as if it is being checked
out), and press <cr>.
System calculates new due date according to circulation rules and agency
parameters.
The renewal count is incremented (Staff renewal with item)
If user views "Circulation Item Details", the appropriate Renewals information should
be updated (renewals used/remaining)
Cursor focus returns to barcode entry area, ready to receive next scan (if previous
barcode is still displayed, it should be automatically replaced by whatever is entered
next)
A check of the item and patron circulation statistics screens shows a new row for the
renewal with the renewal date/time and the new due date.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

52

Testing
Developers write unit tests. The Test team and Product Owners do
manual testing. An Automation Test team in Utah creates scripts for
an automated testing tool. Stress testing is as needed.
During the Sprint, the Product Owner tests features that are in the
Sprint backlog. Up until 2006, testers received a stable Sprint build
only after the Sprint demo. The reason for this was a lower tester/
developer ratio than recommended by the Scrum Alliance.
There are 30 team members in North America and 26 team
members in St. Petersburg on this project. The St. Petersburg team
has one project leader, 3 technical team leaders, 18 developers, 1 test
lead, and 3 testers. This low tester/developer ratio initially made it
impossible to have a fully tested package of code at the end of the
Sprints.
The test-first approach was initially encouraged and not mandated.
Tests were written simultaneously with code most of the time. GUIs
were not unit tested.

Functional Area

Reserve Book Room

Task Description

Check that items from Item List is placed under Reserve with Inactive status

Condition

1. User has right to place Items under Reserve

2. At least one Item List exists in the system
3. Default Reserve Item Status in Session Defaults is set to Inactive

Entry Point

Launcher is opened

Test Data

No specific data

Action

Expected Results

1. Reserve > Reserve Item

2. Select Item Search icon
3. Select Item List in the Combo box list of search options and enter appropriate Item list
name
4. Press Enter
5. Select all Items which appear in the Item Search combo box and press OK
1. Items that were in Item list should appear in the list in Reserve Item
2. Status of all items that has been just added should be shown as Inactive
3. Save button should be inactive
4. All corresponding Items should retain their original parameters

Functional test example.

53

In the summer of 2006, a new CTO of SirsiDynix, Talin Bingham,

took over the project and introduced Test Driven Design. Every
Sprint starts with the usual Sprint Planning meeting and teams are
responsible for writing functional tests before doing any coding.
Once functional tests are written and reviewed, coding starts. Testfirst coding is mandated. When coding is complete, developers run
unit tests and manually pass all the functional tests before checking
in changes to the repository.
Automation testing is done using the Compuware TestPartner tool,
but there is still room for improvement of test coverage.

Configuration Management
SirsiDynix was using CVS as source code repository when the
decision was made to engage an outsourcing firm. At that time,
SirsiDynix made a decision that CVS could not be used effectively
because of lack of support for distributed development, largely seen
in long code synchronization times. Other tools were evaluated and
Perforce was chosen as the best solution.
StarSoft had seen positive results on many projects using Perforce.
It is fast, reliable and offers local proxy servers for distributed teams.
Although not a cheap solution, it has been very effective for the
SirsiDynix project.
Automated builds run every hour with email generated back to
developers. It takes 12 minutes to do a build, 30 minutes if the
database changes. StarSoft would like to see faster builds and true
concurrent engineering. Right now builds are only stable every two
weeks at Sprint boundaries.

Pair Programming, Refactoring, and other XP

practices
StarSoft is an XP company and tries to introduce XP practices into
all their projects. Pair programming is done on more complicated
pieces of functionality. Refactoring was planned for future Sprints
and not done in every iteration as in XP. Some radical refactoring
without loss of functionality occurred as the project approached
completion. Continuous integration is implemented as hourly builds.

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54

On this project, these three engineering practices were used with

Scrum as the primary project management methodology.

Measuring Progress
The project uses the Jira <http://www.atlassian.com> issue tracking
and project management software. This gives everyone on the project
a real-time view into the state of Sprints. It also provides
comprehensive management reporting tools.
Data from Jira can be downloaded into Excel to create any
requested data analysis. High velocity projects need an automated
tool to track status across teams and geographies. The best tools
support bug tracking and status of development tasks in one system
and avoid extra work on data entry by developers. Such tools should
track tasks completed by developers and work remaining. They
provide more detailed and useful data than time sheets, which should
be avoided. Time sheets are extra overhead that do not provide useful
information on the state of the project, and are de-motivating to
developers.

SirsiDynix Horizon 8.0 Project Dashboard showing the Sprint burn-down chart,
a snapshot of Earned Business, and a synopsis of bug status.

55

Other companies like PatientKeeper have found tools that

incorporate both development tasks and defects that can be packaged
into a Sprint Backlog are highly useful for complex development
projects. Thousands of tasks and dozens of Sprints can be easily
maintained and reviewed real-time with the right tool.

Resulting Context with Integrated Scrums

Collaboration of SirsiDynix and StarSoft turned the Horizon 8.0
project into one of the most productive Scrum projects ever
documented. For example, data is provide in the table below on a
project that was done initially with a waterfall team and then reimplemented with a Scrum team. The waterfall team took 9 months
with 60 people and generated 54000 lines of code. It was reimplemented by a Scrum team of 4.5 people in 12 months. The
resulting 50,803 lines of code had more functionality and higher
quality.

Person Months
Java LOC
Function Points
FP per dev/
month

Scrum

Waterfall

SirsiDynix

54
50.083
959
17.8

540
54000
900
2.0

827
671.688
12673
15.3

Function Points/Developer Month for collocated vs. distributed projects.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

56

Capers Jones of Software Productivity Research has published

extensive tables on average number of function points per lines of
code for all major languages. Since the average lines of code per
function point for Java is 53, we can estimate the number of function
points in the Scrum application. The waterfall implementation is
known to have fewer function points.
Distributed teams working on Horizon 8.0 generated 671,688 lines
of code in 14.5 months with 56 people. During this period they
radically refactored the code on two occasions and reduced the code
base by 275,000. They have not been penalized for refactoring as
that is rarely done in large waterfall projects in the database from
which Capers derived his numbers. They have also not been
rewarded for refactoring even though reducing lines of code is
viewed as important as adding new code on well-run Agile projects.
Jones has also shown from his database of tens of thousands of
projects that industry average productivity is 12.5 function points per
developer/month for a project of 900 function points and that this
drops to 3 for a project with 13000 function points. Some of this is
due to 4GL and other code-automation tools used on small projects,
many of which are not implemented in third generation languages
like Java.
The SirsiDynix project is almost as productive as the small Scrum
project with a collocated team of 4.5 people. For a globally dispersed
team, it is one of the most productive projects ever documented at a
run rate of five times industry average.

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Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

58

CHAPTER 6

Can Scrum projects fail?

Lets face it: although the success rate is astonishingly high,
scrum projects sometimes fail most often due to poor
leadership.
Scrum can be seen as a framework for continuous process
improvement. Harvard Professor John Kotter notes that 70% of
change processes fail, primarily due to a lack of sense of urgency
among the leadership.
Scrum is very resilient with a success rate of over 70% according
to the latest worldwide survey of over 2000 companies (Version One
survey). Yet it is not a silver bullet and leadership failure is the
primary cause of Scrum failure. Lets look at two examples.

Case Study 1: EmbeddedWaterFall.com

(by Roman Pichler of Pichler Consulting Ltd., London)

Harvard Professor John

Kotter notes that 70% of
change processes fail,
primarily due to a lack of
sense of urgency among the
leadership.

At a development organization specializing in embedded

communications products, the head of development was determined
to implement Scrum in order to get faster delivery, higher quality
from software teams. Lets call this company
EmbeddedWaterFall.com. A pilot project to create a new software
system was selected. Success would strongly influence the future of
the development organization.
Product management at EmbeddedWaterFall.com was sceptical
about Agile processes. Three Scrum teams created an architectural
baseline/internal release in six months of two-week iterations which
included deployment. Developers embraced Agile practices well, the
head of development was pleased with results, and product
management liked the transparency of reporting. The Human
Resource department was encouraged to align performance
appraisals with agile practice as it is fun, a challenge, and a
positive change.
Then impediments begin to appear. Scaling to eight teams is
difficult. Velocity of software delivery is lower than expected. Reorganization at headquarters leads to loss of support for Agile
practice from product management. The head of development now
insists that date and scope must be met. Command and control with

59

task-based planning is implemented along with overtime and

weekend work. Most agile development practices are abandoned.
EmbeddedWaterFall.com reverted to type.
There was an extensive analysis of root causes and lessons learned
on this project. The bottom line is failure of management to
understand agile practice and failure of management commitment to
implement Scrum made it impossible to remove impediments at the
first sign of trouble.

Case Study 2: GameOver.now

(by Henrik Kniberg of Crisp SA, Stockholm)
A second case study shows how aggressive action can resolve
management challenges when management is willing to adapt and
remove impediments to Scrum implementation. Lets call this
company GameOver.now where Scrum was implemented for the
most important project in the company to deliver a critical software
application on a fixed date in April of 2007.
A Scrum team ran two-week sprints from April to September in
2006 to produce detailed requirements. Then they ran two-week
sprints to code the requirements from October to December. January
through March of 2007 was reserved for testing.
In January the code is not complete, testing has not begun, and the
management is hovering over the team worried about progress. They
call in an expert Scrum trainer who notices the team is not really a
team. The DBA works independently on her set of tasks. A three
person subgroup in the team mistrusts everyone else. Management is
starting to micromanage an impending disaster. Waterfall has been
implemented under a Scrum banner.
The Scrum trainer says it is time to implement Scrum. We will
create a product backlog, estimate the product backlog, find the
actual velocity of the team by running two sprints, and determine the
release date by building a roadmap. Created and estimating stories
using Planning Poker for incomplete product backlog showed that
180 points were remaining. There were 70 points of testing
remaining for the portion of the backlog that had been coded. The
team completed two sprints with a velocity of 10. At current

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

60

capacity, the project would take 25 two-week sprints and be

delivered a year late.
In order to improve the date, the size of the backlog needs to be
reduced and the velocity needs to be increased. However, the root
cause of the current problem is management lack of focus. A
companywide meeting is held and the top priority project is clearly
explained to the entire staff. They are told not to disrupt the team, to
help them whenever they can, and that this project is really the top
priority for the company.
The team systematically removes impediments and triples their
velocity to 30 points per sprint. They deliver an early release to the
customer in the same quarter as the original schedule. The customer
is both surprised and happy. They deliver a final incremental release
during the next quarter. While the project was several months late, it
was six months earlier than the waterfall Scrum would have
delivered it.
The lesson here is that even a failed project can be rescued at the
eleveth hour by Scrum if management and the team will actually
implement Scrum.

The lesson here is that even a

failed project can be rescued
at the eleveth hour by Scrum if
management and the team will
actually implement Scrum.

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Appendix 1

Whos who in Scrum?

This is a list of people, organisations and teams who have
inspired, informed and instructed Jeff Sutherland and his
colleagues. Hence, they have all contributed to the creation of
Scrum in their own special manner.
Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, the Godfathers of Scrum,
unknowingly gave Scrum its name and helped create a global
transformation of software development. The New New Product
Development Game. Harvard Business Review, (January-February
1986)
Jim Coplien and the ATT Bell Labs Pasteur Project wrote the paper
on the most productive software development team ever documented
the Borland Quattro Pro Project. The first Scrum team
implemented the Scrum daily meeting after reading this paper.
Alan Kay and his team at Xerox Parc invented Smalltalk, the mouse,
the graphical user interface, the personal computer, the Ethernet, and
the laser printer. Listening to his insights on innovation inspired the
first Scrum team to go from good to great.
Professor Rodney Brooks launched the startup now known as
iRobot in space leased from Jeff Sutherland. He taught the
subsumption architecture, how to create simple rules to produce
highly intelligent performance from complex adaptive systems.
Christopher Langton of Los Alamos Labs and the Sante Fe Institute
coined the term artificial life and showing that increasing degrees
of freedom up to the edge of chaotic behavior accelerated their
evolution. Scrum feels chaotic by intent, so as to accelerate
software evolution.
The French object-database developers working near the MIT
campus at Graphael (later Object Databases, then Matisse Software)
were the first to demonstrate in Lisp and then in C++ the Agile
patterns of pair programming, radical refactoring, continuous
integration, common ownership of code, world class user interface
design, and other tips and tricks which Kent Bent used to create

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

62

eXtreme Programming a decade later. These were all incorporated

into the first Scrum.
The Creative Initiative Foundation worked with Silicon Valley
volunteers to help make the world a better place, the underlying
motivation driving the founders of Scrum. This connected the CoCreators of Scrum with the early systems thinking of MIT Professor
Peter Senge who later wrote The Fifth Discipline.
Capers Jones and his productivity experts at Software Productivity
Research analyzed and reanalyzed the output of early Scrum teams,
as well as many of the software products built with Scrum during
1994-2000. These analyses allowed the first Scrum team to provide a
money-back guarantee that users would double productivity during
the first month using tools created by the first Scrum.
The first Scrum team John Scumniotales (ScrumMaster), Don
Roedner (Product Owner), Jeff McKenna (Senior Consultant), Joe
Kinsella (object-relational mapping), Laurel Ginder (QA), and
three Danish developers - Grzegorz Ciepiel, Bent Illum, and John
Lindgreen. They endured repeated failure, depressing analysis of
these failures in front of their technical peers from other companies,
and transcendence of their missteps. They were the first Scrum team
to achieve the hyperproductive state for which Scrum was designed
and their product, Object Studio, was reported as industry leader by
computer trade journals. Little did they know that Scrum would be
their greatest contribution.
PatientKeeper, Inc., the first company to fully implement an All at
Once or Type C Scrum involving the entire company in Scrum
practice. This innovation in process design has been documented by
Mary and Tom Poppendieck in their book on Lean Software
Development. I find that the vast majority of organizations are still
trying to do too much stuff, and thus find themselves thrashing. The
only organization I know of which has really solved this is Patient
Keeper.

63

Christopher Alexander coined the phrase quality without a

name (QWAN) something that many Scrum practitioners
experience. The phrase was used in the book The Timeless Way of
Building, where Alexander describes a certain quality that we seek,
but which cannot be named. This may be the most important feature
of Scrum and can only be spoken of as a set of core values openness, focus, commitment, courage, and respect. It could be
viewed as the speed of trust or one of the sources of ba often
seen on Scrum teams. Ba is the Japanese term for the creative flow
of innovation described by Takeuchi and Nonaka.

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook

64

Appendix 2

References
For a complete list of Jeff Sutherland papers, please visit http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/.

C. Jakobsen and J. Sutherland, Scrum and CMMI Going from Good to Great: are you
ready-ready to be done-done?, in Agile 2009, Chicago, 2009.
K. Schwaber and J. Sutherland. The Scrum Guide. Scrum.org, 2010.
A. Sutherland, J. Sutherland, and C. Hegarty, Scrum in Church: Saving the World One
Team at a Time, in Agile 2009, Chicago, 2009.
J. Sutherland, Future of Scrum: Parallel Pipelining of Sprints in Complex Projects, in
AGILE 2005 Conference Denver, CO: IEEE, 2005.
J. Sutherland and I. Altman, Organizational Transformation with Scrum: How a Venture
Capital Group Gets Twice as Much Done with Half the Work, in 43rd Hawaii
International Conference on Software Systems, Kauai, Hawaii, 2010.
J. Sutherland, S. Downey, and B. Granvik, Shock Therapy: A Bootstrap for a HyperProductive Scrum in Agile 2009, Chicago, 2009.
J. Sutherland, G. Schoonheim, and M. Rijk, Fully Distributed Scrum: The Secret Sauce
for Hyperproductive Offshored Development Teams, in Agile 2008, Toronto,
2008.
J. Sutherland and K. Schwaber, The Scrum Papers: Nuts, Bolts, and Origins of an Agile
Method. Boston: Scrum, Inc., 2007.
J. Sutherland, A. Viktorov, J. Blount, and N. Puntikov, Distributed Scrum: Agile Project
Management with Outsourced Development Teams, in HICSS'40, Hawaii
International Conference on Software Systems Big Island, Hawaii: IEEE, 2007.
H. Takeuchi and I. Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game, Harvard
Business Review, 1986.

65

Nuts, Bolts, and Origins of an Agile Framework

Jeff Sutherlands Scrum Handbook is the perfect companion for any ambitious team
member of a Scrum project. Being written by one of the co-creators of the method
itself, and based on his 15 years of experiences from a long range of companies, it
contains not only accurate descriptions of the methodology but also statements and
conclusions that are proven by trials in real-life projects.
The book is built up of two major parts:
Part I Scrum Basics This part gives an introduction to Scrum. It is a good
starting point for anyone new to the method, but also a source of inspiration for
anyone who needs to explain the method to others. It contains a short overview of
Scrum, a detailed description of the roles in Scrum, and a guide on best practices for
starting up a Scrum project.
Part II Scrum at Work The second part can be seen as a chronicle of Scrum
illustrated with a number of case studies which have been carried out by Jeff
Sutherland over the years. One chapter is dedicated to a particulary large case,
SirsiDynix, where the difficulties of intercontinental distributed Scrum are
scrutinized.

Author Jeff Sutherland Ph.D, created the first Scrum in 1993 and formalized the
Scrum development process with Scrum Co-Creator Ken Schwaber. Jeff is Chairman
of the Scrum Training Institute, CEO of Scrum, Inc. and Senior Advisor and Agile
Coach to OpenView Venture Partners.

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