Scrum Principle : Manage Empirically. Product evolves based on understanding of technology, evolving product, evolving partnerships, and drop dead date.

Once upon a time there was a software company with a great product vision and a large installed base using proprietary, character cell based, 20 year old software. The company spent so much time maintaining and updating the current product that their customer base was losing faith and companies with newer technology were able to get the new customers.

The competitors had spent several years building products using client server products based on Visual Basic fat clients and relational database servers. Compared to the character cell products of the software company, these applications looked modern.

The software company’s problem was how to demonstrate their vision and their ability to deliver the vision. And if this demonstration could be done in a way that leapfrogged the competition, all the better.

The industry served by the software company provided services based on the analysis of high-density analog pictures. Professionals would review the pictures, mark them up, collaborate with other professionals, and then act on the results. All the software applications at the time of the case study used digital information that described the pictures and facilitated dialog.

The software company used Scrum to deliver their vision to the marketplace and their existing customers in three quick Sprints, using one team of engineers :

Sprint 1 : the team acquired a software compression engine that compressed and decompressed high density pictures. They quickly built picture server that combined the compressed pictures with digitally descriptive data from their current software. A java applet was built that delivered up the pictures with the data to professionals with mobile PC’s.

Sprint 2 : the team used mark-up technology to capture pen-strokes on the digital picture. These were captured on the picture server and facilitated online dialog regarding the meaning of the pictures.

Sprint 3 : the team stabilized the picture server, the picture server connections to the current software, and broadened the software on which the picture display could occur.

At the end of each Sprint, the team demonstrated its progress to internal management and sales. At the end of the third Sprint, the application was demonstrated at a major trade show.

The result was a complete destabilization of the marketplace. The software vendor leapfrogged the competition, using thin client technology, demonstrating their vision of advancing their administrative system to support professional work. The software vendor also spelled out their future development, emphasizing the professional workplace and minimizing the need to update their outdated technology (since it served the new applications, rather than being the core of them).

Scrum’s philosophy is to provide development teams with a product vision and counts on them to do their best to realize that vision. The assumption is that unconstrained teams have significantly more creativity and intelligence than a directed, tightly managed team