Staying agile in government software projects

Can government software projects be agile? What do Scrum and XP practices have to offer in this regulated and highly political environment? In this experience report, I will discuss some of the unique challenges in our environment and how we have had to adapt these practices to produce commercial-grade software. I will provide a "report card" on our progress in applying Scrum and XP practices to a clinical data management project over a two-year period. In addition, I will describe the practices that were accepted "religiously", adapted to get the job done, and abandoned completely. In particular, I will discuss how we got around bootstrapping, rational tools, documentation needs, and managing a product backlog for a diverse, decentralized user community. Putting these practices to work was hard, but they resulted in better team communication, a more usable product, and improved partnership between the users and the development team. In addition, staying agile is just as hard as becoming agile.