Jack Blount, President and CEO of Dynix and later CTO of the merged SirsiDynix company, selected StarSoft because of its history of successful XP implementations and its 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 the team to choose an Integrated Scrums implementation. Jack Bloun'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 was a key factor in his decision to structure the project as Integrated Scrums.
System and Tools
The project uses a three-tier architecture and uses Hibernate as a database abstraction layer. Oracle 10g, MS SQL, and IBM DB2 support is provided. The JBoss 4 Application server is used with a Java GUI Client with WebStart bootstrap. It is a cross-platform product supporting MS Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Red Hat Linux, and Sun Solaris. Built-in multi-language support has on-the-fly resource editing for ease of localization. Other key technologies are JAAS, LDAP, SSL, Velocity, Xdoclet, JAXB, JUnit, and Jython.
The project uses the Jira 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. Figure 1 shows the Sprint burn-down chart and a snapshot of Earned Business Value on the project along with a synopsis of bug status.
Scrum Meetings: Addressing the Time Difference
One of the obvious obstacles to keeping everyone on the project synchronized is the 10-hour time difference between St. Petersburg and Utah. To create an overlap of three to four hours, the Russian team adjusts its schedule and comes in at 12:00 p.m., while the US team starts its work between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m. local time.
Teams meet across geographies at 7:45am Utah time which is 17:45 St. Petersburg time. Teams have found it necessary to answer the three Scrum questions in writing and distribute the answers by email before the Scrum meeting. This shortens the time needed for teleconference on the joint meeting and helps overcome any language barriers. Each individual reports on what he did since the last meeting, what he intends to do next, and what impediments are blocking his progress. The shifted office hours allow for enough overlap so that both sides of the project can stay online after the Scrum meeting to jointly complete some immediate follow-up items.
The team uses email exchange on the three questions before the daily Scrum teleconference throughout the project to enable phone meetings to proceed more smoothly and efficiently. These daily team calls help the people in Russia and the U.S. to learn to understand each other.
For greater focus and productivity, the Russian team starts its day with a local Scrum meeting. Everyone is using the same process and technologies and daily meetings coordinate activities within the teams.
Sprints
The duration of the Sprints was chosen to be two weeks: this was as long as SirsiDynix felt it could go without synchronizing and getting the complete picture of what is happening in the project. The team holds a Sprint planning meeting that is the same as an XP release planning meeting in which requirements from User Stories are broken down into development tasks.
The lag time for a 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
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