Bootstrapping Scrum and XP under crisis - a story from the trenches
A high-volume online poker system deployed prematurely and crashing every day. 50 (fifty!) consultants thrown in near the end to rush the release. The worst code anybody in the project had ever seen. Team members working 80 hour weeks.
This is what I saw when I started as CTO of a Swedish gaming company. 3 days into the job we crashed the national poker tournament and were thrashed in the tabloids. A few days later I was notified that half my team would have to go, just in time for christmas. Oh, and someone promised media that we would re-run the national poker tournament within 5 weeks.
So the already burnt-out team now had to make the system scalable and stable within 5 weeks, while simultaneously being reduced to 50% staff size. The CEO’s words: “you can do whatever you want with the team, you have my full support, we have nothing to lose, this is our last chance”. Great.
Our strategy: “Heck, let’s go all-out Scrum and XP”.
In this session I’ll describe the rather dramatic agile transitioning event that later gave rise to my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches.
This is a popular talk, was given best speaker award in the Netherlands for it :o)
Target audience
- Anybody interested in agile transitioning war stories.
This is a talk with slides and examples. I’ll cover (roughly):
- How the situation looked when I came in
- How it got what way
- What our solution trategy was
- How we executed it
- Which key decisions were made along the way and why
- What key impediments got in our way and how we dealt with them
- How it all played out
- Key lessons learned
The focus is on the bootstrapping & transitioning process itself, not the detailed agile practices (those are described in my book, and possibly in a separate session as well).