Subcontracting for Scrum Teams: Experiences and Guidelines from a Large Development Organization

Agile methods and Scrum especially have drawn the attention of large software industry. Whilst originally accepted as a way of working for small companies and teams, more and more of the large organizations have adopted the Scrum method as their primary vehicle for delivering value to their customers. This transformation is not always without difficulties, however. One particular issue is that large organizations seldom develop software on their own but rather typically use massive amounts of subcontractors and their subcontractors to meet the sky-rocketing demand for new software. Only few experiences have been reported on how agile teams in a large organization succeed when they are networked with hundreds of different subcontractors distributed in global development space. This paper reports experiences based on 5 years of practicing Scrum together with subcontractors. Results reveal that often the agile team´s performance is significantly hurt by having non-agile subcontractors participating to the development and that frameworks used for defining contracting structures are far behind from today´s needs, leading to many problems in practice.