Scrum Case Studies

I'v e recently been asked by one team to provide them with case studies/success stories about Scrum to prove scrum works. It is striking that the people ask for case studies about agile - but didn't before adopting their existing process.

Ken Schwaber co-creator of Scrum has: Primavera Success Story (pdf) a paper that describes Primavera's struggles with waterfall and then their transition to Scrum (with XP engineering practices). Key message: Scrum works for Primavera, but changing the process isn't easy.

Stuart Read, Professor of Marketing at IMD in Lausanne Switzerland has written a case study about Guidewire (pdf) - a insurance billing company that is built entirely around Scrum.

On InfoQ (caveat emptor I'm an InfoQ editor) there are a number of case studies:

• Scrum Boosts Effectiveness at the BBC (presentation), "In this conference talk Andrew Scotland tells how BBC's New Media division, characterized by a lot of uncertainty and emergent software process, decided to use Scrum to more effectively deliver software amidst all that change and uncertainty. Three years later - the difference is significant, and the journey was worthwhile."
• Case study: Distributed Scrum Project for Dutch Railways - focused on how one group has made a necessary evil (distributed teams) work, this case study is also a good example of how Scrum works
• Improvement, Success and Failure: Scrum Adoption in China - an interesting Q&A. The questions around failures are very interesting: Training is critical and doing Scrum-but will eventually kill.
• Henrik Kniberg's famous "Scrum an XP from the Trenches" a 168 page ebook (free) that describes how one team does scrum.

UIE a usability website has: The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site - while not strictly a Scrum case study Netflix does use Agile methods.

Obviously Ken's book Agile Project Management with Scrum is a series of case studies.

DDJ has Embedded Agile: A Case Study In Numbers an article that demonstrates Agile working in the embedded environment. Timo Punkka documents Schneider-Electric's adoption of Scrum for embedded software development.

Mishkin Berteig has one called: A Cautionary Tale.It looks an Agile Adoption delayed and what the delay cost the organisation.

Agile From The Trenches - A real world example - Keith Sterling's (BTW Keith can you stop moving this article :-)) story of Agile adoption in a UK telco to help it build and rollout a broadband provisioning platform.

Rally has a number of Customer Case Studies - Caveat Emptor while interesting they were written to prove that Rally can help you transition to Agile - so they tend to be slick and focused on Rally benefits. Net result - they're a wee bit light on specifics. They also have Agile Impact Paper written by IDC - good paper about the impact - but what a pain to download - I'm surprised I wasn't asked how many children I have.

Danube also have Customer Case Studies - same caveat as Rally applies.

Finally Frank Maurer, a professor at U Calgary has: Agile Software Development: An Industrial Case Study with data showing increased productivity.

Google reveals many more case studies - but if the above weren't sufficient then no case study will help convince. Finally I suggest stop reading case studies, take action. Get some training, find a mentor and start. Your first few iterations will not be your best but you will improve with time.

As a counter point some of you may recall my Journal of Agile/Scrum Failure - which is still looking for contributions.

Update: Added Case Studies from Mishkin and Rally. Latest additions Keith's efforts and Timo's embedded paper. Added samples from Danube.

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