Devops for Growth

So how does this work out? At MySpace all groups achieved exit. All, but one, improved after that. One group even achieved a whopping 1,650% improvement after just four months (16 sprints). At Jayway one of the teams used such a bootstrap technique, primarily on the technical side, and reached 800% after 3 months.

The second part of this blog can be found here: Scrum Shock Therapy, Part 2 where I will look into how to handle management and organisation with some recipes.

In a show of hands, half the people in the room doing Scrum admit to passing the first 3 questions of the Nokia Test.

Only 10% of teams meet all criteria. (I'd say only one of our two teams is currently doing this)

Even ScrumButt brought a measured 35% benefit to teams using it.

Challenges for new agile developers:

They can't self-organise.
They spend weeks arguing about the format of the board and get nothing done.
They don't follow priorities - everyone does their own thing and the sprint fails.
They can't get DONE at the end of the sprint.
They allow not-READY things to enter the sprint.
They can take years to work this out. Some don't.

As investors, Jeffs VC group invests only in Scrum+XP companies. Scrum is driven at board level. Many run management team, marketing, client services and support with Scrum.

What's the secret sauce? They want to change the face of investment in the US.

Implement basic Scrum practices and pass Nokia tets
Involve management, understand velocity

Some companies see 300% improvement in 3 2-week sprints - it used to take years.

Waterfall : 2 function points/dev pcm.
Scrum: 17.8 function points/dev pcm (w/ Mike Cohn test)
SirsiDynix: linearly scalability of a distributed team, 15.3 function points/dev pcm with team split between Moscow and US.
Xebia: half the team in Holland, half India. 15.1 function points/dev pcm. Their definition of "done" is the customer doing acceptance tests and judging complete before the end of a sprint.

Takes MySpace as an example: 1/3 of the company is waterfall, 1/3 ScrumButt, 1/3 Scrum. They have hundreds of developers, owned by Fox News, have founders running development. Management doesn't understand Agile and isn't committed. They brought in 30 project leaders who tried Scrum and thought it was "getting in the way of controlling projects". They've been trying to get rid of it.

They've tried "shock therapy": a set of good practices, but no choice. In agile, we want self-managing teams, but when the team doesn't know how to do this there's a problem.

Leadership changes from directing (telling the team) to coaching (involving the team) to supporting (team takes the lead) to delegating (team does it all). The goal of a Scrummaster is to work themselves out of a job as fast as possible.

Shows Aikido picture.

It's like learning the tango. You need a coach. "There are many of us in agile practice who have worked in martial arts, and there are lots of similarities".

Scott at Myspace takes 2.9 days per team member to improve team velocity by 240%. He's not necessarily popular!

Scrum as a framework gives teams lots of options. In practice, this overwhelms many teams. Just as customers don't know what they want, many agile teams don't know what to do til they're doing it. Scott's rules stay in effect until a team meets their goals for 3 sprints.

The references here are intended to capture all of the current topic information I could find. But it’s changed. For example, I used to be able to view the paper that Jeff and Scott wrote for the agile conference. I can no longer find a free version of it.

From Jeff Sutherlands, ScrumInc blog: https://www.scruminc.com/shock-therapy-bootstrapping/
And a PowerPoint deck from Jeff’s blog: http://jeffsutherland.org/scrum/SelfOrganizationShockTherapy.pdf
From OpenView: https://www.scruminc.com/shock-therapy-bootstrapping/
From Bjorn Granvik: https://bjorngranvik.wordpress.com/tag/shock-therapy/
http://www.jayway.com/2008/11/17/scrum-shock-therapy-part-1/
http://www.jayway.com/2008/12/17/scrum-shock-therapy-part-2/
From David Koontz: http://agilecomplexificationinverter.blogspot.com/2009/10/shock-therapy-good-for-team.html
Mike Cottmeyer: http://www.leadingagile.com/2010/06/hyperproductivity-in-scrum/