Stefano Rizzo, Polarion Software am Swiss Requirements Day 2011.
Polarion builds software for product owners and developers. It supports requirements management among other.
They use SCRUM themselves in order to develop their software across distributed development teams in different countries. The shift was slowly, improving things one at the time.
Scrum is well accepted with product owners and developers, but frightens management: What will we get for a certain investment? Is Scrum also suited for large projects?
The product backlog items are divided into user stories that describe the tasks in natural language, e.g. ‹the user must be able to reset the status of an item to the original one›.
Each backlog item must provide business value and it must be testable.
The backlog population is structured in 6 backlogs: features, usability, process, performance, integration, Q & A. This allows for changing priorities, e.g. the next release may focus more on performance and only partly in features. Customers provide a customer demand list, sales and strategy teams give input to the product manager.
The planning entity for the sprint is a user story. They should be atomic in order to be implemented in one sprint. It is self-explanatory and valuable.
Each user demand is rated in terms of revenue or cost. Also the estimated customer satisfaction is gauged.
Strategy meetings drive innovation. Innovation is rarely induced by customers. Nevertheless Polarion asks customers for impressions and suggestions for improvements.
Definition of user stories is the critical botleneck. With scrum developers are told what to do precisely, so they could turn frustrated. Polarion set up competition for user stories between their teams. The teams then try to deliver better results than the other. The teams are reshuffled from time to time.