Scrum Day 2011 - Agile Software Product Development at SAP

--> see my talk at the Scrum Day 2011 (28 September, Darmstadt, Germany):

http://www.scrum-day.de/vortraege/agilesoftwareproductdevelopmentatsap.html

Abstract:

After more than four years of successful experience with Scrum (worldwide 300+ projects), SAP has decided to introduce a Lean Software Development Model at a large scale in its development organization based on Scrum. The presentation describes the approach including Lean introduction and transformation models, Scrum scaling concepts , key success factors and challenges for an organization with approx. 10.000 people. The audience will participate in one of the most challenging and fascinating Scrum introductions underway including real life examples.

Agility and Reuse in Large-Scale Enterprise Software Development

As I mentioned before, large-scale settings on the development side and complex enterprise software as product make achieving agility and efficiency even harder to achieve. Efficiency can, for instance, be improved by managed reuse of existing solutions, components, code as well as other artifacts.

However, this leads to lots of non-trivial trade-off decisions and conflicts among different organizational units (within and/or between companies).

This in turn made me design an according lecture at the University of Mannheim...

Here comes agile - or even lean - development

After some years of maturing both, technology-wise and with respect to development processes, a paradigm of iterative and incremental software product development emerged - today this is called agile development and deeply intertwined with values stemming from lean thinking which is rooted in the automotive industry, e.g. the well-known Toyota Production System (TPS).

It is not by chance that some agile pioneers, such as Kent Beck, had a history of software projects in the automotive before compiling and agreeing the agile manifesto in 2001...

Software Requirements Engineering - quo vadis?

After 8 years in the software industry and software engineering research, one topics comes back over and over again: requirements engineering - or how to build the right software right?

That is, this “simple” process of understanding what the user wants and deriving a useful solution for that problem as well as building that solution in an efficient manner.

Traditional requirements engineering assumed that the more time you invest upfront, the better the specification (as collection of requirements) will get and thus the rest of the project is just about implementing this set of requirement.

However, as numerous projects in the industry showed this assumption might be flawed. The fact that software in an intangible good and that software vendors promise to be able to solve any given problem with their solutions does not really help either…