CMMI Case Study : What about quality with V-Cycle vs. Agile-Scrum ?? and link with the theory of evolution...

"Soirée de rentrée du SUG le 30 Septembre 2010" is a meeting I attended a while ago.

Since it is particularly interesting to show figures on how Scrum helped improving the overall quality of a product, within a CMMI context, I wanted to comment some of the major elements of the presentation concerning General Electric :

• More Business Value delivered per release : twice as much between 2 major releases. This is because Scrum focuses on working with priority set on high ROI features,
• Less days required to delivering a Business Value unit : divided by 2 between 2 major releases. This is because a good Scrum team is not scared to criticize the existing procedures and make them change for the next iteration. On the other hand, a good Scrum team will gather key data into BI tools to analyse them and find ways to optimize things, just like a scientific approach within the Mechanical Engineering industry (such as car production lines).
• Less defects per release : divided by 12 in about 2 years time, and the trends shows that it tends to  zero ! because for a good Scrum Team, a user story can only be done and completed, with a series of strict validations. Moreover the Continuous Integration process based on a large amount of Unit Testing and GUI testing guaranties that we don't have any regressions.
• The Turn-over of the people within the team is less a problem : This is because of the emphasis on the oral communication and due to the pair-programming to force the exchange of the information within all members of a team.
• No more delays for the releases : This is due to the short cycle of the iteration period, where at the end of each iteration, we MUST have a working product that could potentially be shipped to production. To do so, you must have a state of the art Software Factory, with a large amount of automated tests and builds,

Important UPDATE: I forgot to mention about a major side effect presented when implementing Scrum after a V-Cycle on this project :
The team hated those daily meetings and talking about what they did... thinking that this method was implemented to spy them. As a result, the turnover was quite important. After a while, not only people got used to it, but they realized that this entire Scrum process helped them delivering better quality product.  

The slides was made public by the French Scrum User Goup

and can be found Here or here : http://www.frenchsug.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2818123 

Another link is : "start tiny to end up huge : the art of the incremental build"
Commencer petit pour finir grand : l'art de la construction incrémentale par Etienne Charignon

Happy reading.