Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: CIO Magazine, Essential Technology Date: April 2009

Why Agile makes sense for organisations during a global downturn; based on interviews with Jon Scumniotales, the first dedicated Scrum Master and David Norton, Gartner Group Analyst.

Scumniotales outlines the key benefits of Agile development as: "Better met customer expectations, higher quality products, on-time delivery and more predictable project execution." These benefits can be gained not only by organisations that are developing sofrware, but also organisations managing other types of software-related projects.

Author: Lorraine Pauls Longhurst Published: CIO Magazine Date: 10 November 2008

Why SCRUM’s agile development framework is more effective than the traditional “waterfall” approach.

SCRUM or agile development was originally designed for “typical” software development. The goal of any software company is to release high-quality software to market as soon as possible. In my extensive experience in software product management, I can tell you that in this type of “typical” software development environment:

• Scope is often not clearly defined and changes frequently. This is because there are more “unknowns” than in most corporate IT projects.
• Rather than tracking the budget closely (as is often the case in corporate IT projects), software companies will spend as many resources as they need to, to release the software to market as soon as possible.

SCRUM works well in this scenario because it enables the software company to be flexible with the project scope by defining a prioritised list of features (called the product backlog). The developers commit to a set of features they will complete within a time period of less than 30 days, which is called a sprint.