From CMMI and Isolation to Scrum, Agile, Lean and Collaboration

This paper describes a journey from 2004 to 2008 when SoftwarePeople in Denmark, together with a partner from Bangladesh, established a subsidiary company more than 7000 km away from Denmark. We hired 20 people in one week in Bangladesh and started to use CMMI processes to integrate development teams between the two locations with the goal of receiving a CMMI level 3 certification in 1.5 years. After some challenging time we stopped the CMMI project and switched back to agile and lean techniques with more collaboration. Here we describe our experience with implementing global big bang Scrum and building a Kaizen culture. A journey from long running projects, technical dept and integration nightmares to small batches of work, continuous integration and faster delivery of business value. This is reported by Hans Baggesen, Team Lead for one of the Danish R&D teams (2007-2008) and Mads Troels Hansen, CTO and co-founder (2004-2007).