Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Phenomenon of Interest:
With the rise of globalization and the development of communication channels offshoring rose
as a very attractive options to companies. Especially in terms of cost which can be the most
important factor for choosing off shoring for startup companies. With their little experience the
companies may find out about the challenges halfway through the projects and they are faced
with obstacles of extended cost or lagging behind their timeline. These obstacles can incur big
losses for startups companies due to their limited resources and fast moving market.
Nowadays there is a growing number of startups who are offshoring their software development
processes. Managing offshoring teams has its many challenges when the companies are using
Agile frameworks. In order to have an effective distributed agile development there are many
challenges that face these companies. The literature is rich with studies focusing on
challenges, tools, best practices for Distributed Agile and Offshore software development.
However there wasn't a big focus on the size of the companies in question. Another observation
is that in many cases the literature did not distinguish if the offshored development teams were
outsourced or in sourced . All of these factors can play an important role in determining the
types of challenges and the degree of complexity of the challenge to the company.
Startups have a different nature and requirements than SMEs and large companies; For
example startup projects have backlog requirements that are continually evolving over short
time spans due to the nature of the market and the resources of the project. Another point is that
startup projects sometime consist of very small teams ( sometimes as small as 3-4 members)
in which each member can play multiple roles in the project. These factors and few other factors
that will be discovered from the literature gives startups a unique characteristics in which it
might need to take a different approach in implementing distributed agile methodologies
2. Theoretical Foundation:
Jeff Sutherland the inventor of scrum has touched the development of distributed scrum from
multiple angles in his paper "Agile Can Scale: Inventing and Reinventing SCRUM in Five
Companies" , (Sutherland, 2001) describes the origin of scrum process and its evolvement in
five companies with few key learnings along the way. the paper gives a comprehensive
background where scrum comes from.
in (Sutherland & Schwaber, 2007) the authors describe the scrum as one set of core processes.
The inspect and the adapt rules of scrums can be possibly tuned to fit any organization. They
also add that there are 3 different type of scrum which are implemented in practice. Isolated
Scrums, Distributed Scrums and Totally integrated scrums. The research case will focus on the
third Type : Totally integrated scrums. In this case scrum teams are cross functional with
members distributed across different geographic locations. The book "The scrum papers: Nuts ,
Bolts and origins of Agile process" by (Sutherland & Schwaber, 2007) contains a compilation of
papers which provides good insight on different Agile processes and their evolvement.
A very good and deep understanding can be obtained from the book " A practical guide of
distributed Scrum" by (Woodward, Surdek, & Ganis, 2010). The book first discusses the
evolution of Scrum and the challenges faced by distributed teams. In the later sections the
authors explain in detail all the steps of starting the scrum project , planning the sprints and the
meetings and how to effectively communicate in the distributed scrum model.
(Berczuk, 2007) discusses four important lessons that were learned from cases operating in a
distributed Agile environment. first lesson that operating in distributed teams amplifies the
existing issues in the process itself and not as much as bringing new issues. Second , that
management shall give the team the support it needs in order to improve and develop the
process to be well suited for the team. Third, good engineering practices are essential for agile
project to succeed and fourth he adds that agile is about people but in the case of Distributed
agile , good and effective tools are need to help people to communicate effectively over
distances
(Sutherland, Schoonheim, Rustenburg, & Rijk, 2008) give a deeper insight on the challenges
faced by fully distributed scrum teams. The paper also draws the light on the offshoring
strategies for overcoming the geographic, language, and cultural barriers that impede
distributed development. The research was carried on 2 case studies of companies who have
implemented Distributed Agile methodology through Scrum/XP practices.
In (Hildenbrand, Geisser, Kude, Bruch, & Acker, 2008) the authors have put the light on XP
within the context of Distributed Software Development . The paper has discussed how the XP
methodology is the suitability and effectiveness of available tools and techniques is discussed. It
has also discussed the collaboration tools that were used during that time for collaboration. The
categories of tools that were used for collaboration 7 years ago are still the same categories as
today, However, the functionality has been enhanced ( for example to support mobile devices ) ,
Besides that many of these tools are available as open source software and don't need to pay
for . Open source software is what startups are relying heavily on.
other papers that have been identified to be very useful source of knowledge for the case of
distributed agile are (Paasivaara, Durasiewicz, & Lassenius, 2009) , (Shrivastava & Date,
2010) , (Hossain, Babar, & Paik, 2009) , (Lee & Yong, 2010) , (Pries-Heje & Pries-Heje, 2011)
and (Bode & Mertens, 2006)
3. Research Question:
as mentioned by (Paasivaara et al., 2009) , Despite the fact that the scientific research on
distributed agile development (DAD), is scarce. There are only a few reported experiences in
applying DAD to industrial projects, and even fewer case studies. Therefore, a knowledge gap
exists on the use of Scrum in GSD in industrial examples. That will be attempted to be
addressed within this case study research
The research will focus on answering the Following questions. How are startup companies
implementing Distributed Agile practices? How is Scrum and other methodologies satisfy their
projects and market needs?
what are the challenges faced by startup companies in this Distributed Agile methodologies?
and what are the best practices that could be identified from their implementation and the
challenges faced by them ?
References
Berczuk, S. (2007). Back to basics: The role of agile principles in success with an distributed
scrum team. Proceedings - AGILE 2007, 382387. http://doi.org/10.1109/AGILE.2007.17
Bode, A., & Mertens, P. (2006). Globalization and offshoring of software. Informatik-Spektrum,
29(3), 171173. http://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-006-0082-z
Hildenbrand, T., Geisser, M., Kude, T., Bruch, D., & Acker, T. (2008). Agile methodologies for
distributed collaborative development of enterprise applications. Proceedings - CISIS
2008: 2nd International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive
Systems, 540545. http://doi.org/10.1109/CISIS.2008.105
Hossain, E., Babar, M. a., & Paik, H. P. H. (2009). Using Scrum in Global Software
Development: A Systematic Literature Review. 2009 Fourth IEEE International Conference
on Global Software Engineering, 175184. http://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2009.25
Hossain, E., Bannerman, P., & Jeffery, D. (2011). Scrum practices in global software
development: a research framework. Product-Focused Software Process , 88102.
Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-21843-9_9
Lee, S., & Yong, H.-S. (2010). Distributed agile: project management in a global environment.
Empirical Software Engineering, 15(2), 204217. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-009-9119-7
Paasivaara, M., Durasiewicz, S., & Lassenius, C. (2009). Using Scrum in Distributed Agile
Development: A Multiple Case Study. 2009 Fourth IEEE International Conference on
Global Software Engineering. http://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2009.27
Pries-Heje, L., & Pries-Heje, J. (2011). Agile & Distributed Project Management: a Case Study
Revealing Why Scrum Is Useful. European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS
2011), Paper 217. Retrieved from http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2011/217
Runeson, P., & Hst, M. (2009). Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in
software engineering. Empirical Software Engineering, 14(2), 131164.
http://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-008-9102-8
Shrivastava, S. V., & Date, H. (2010). Distributed Agile Software Development: Journal of
Computer Science and Engineering, 1(1), 1017.
Sutherland, J. (2001). Agile Can Scale: Inventing and Reinventing SCRUM in Five Companies.
Cutter IT Journal, 14(12), 511.
Sutherland, J., Schoonheim, G., Rustenburg, E., & Rijk, M. (2008). Fully distributed scrum: The
secret sauce for hyperproductive offshored development teams. Proceedings - Agile 2008
Conference, 339344. http://doi.org/10.1109/Agile.2008.92
Sutherland, J., & Schwaber, K. (2007). The Scrum Papers: Nuts , Bolts , and Origins of an Agile
Process. Origins.
Woodward, E., Surdek, S., & Ganis, M. (2010). A practical guide to distributed Scrum. Retrieved
from http://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=9IminAWAfdEC&oi=fnd&pg=PT3&dq=A+practical+
guide+to+distributed+Scrum&ots=WNTn5ifhIw&sig=gknnbskvsp7ZZHhECSMMI
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