I was invited to help a start-up company (a year old company) to build/fix their delivery process. They were catering to local market & had few typical problems:


  • Defects in the application leading to rework;
  • Unable to meet deadlines (this led to financial crunch);
  • Unhappy development & Management teams.


In this organization the mindset was to complete the coding, testing and deliver it to the customer. They did not follow any process; even the requirements/ defects/ enhancements were not tracked. This did not help their purpose, as revenue of the company started to show downward trend.

I worked with all stakeholders & identified adopting Agile-SCRUM would be good for the organization for the below reasons:


  • It was easy & quick to adapt;
  • There were frequent changes to requirements from their client;
  • They had no tools to track the requirements.

There were great challenges to adapt Agile-Scrum Methodologies, some of them were:


  • The total average developer experience in the organization was less than 1.5 years, so the team was not mature enough;
  • They had small projects; for few of them team size was 3. Dedicating a SCRUM master was over kill on these projects;
  • People had little/no knowledge on SCRUM.

1. Plan to Adapt Agile-SCRUM Methodology

  • Identified pilot project that would adapt SCRUM, we picked a medium risk project for two reasons:

- If the project is of low priority Management would have no/little interest;
- If the project had high risk, in case of failure the organization would never try to Adapt Agile.


  • In parallel we started organization wide SCRUM awareness program;
  • We had lengthy discussions with the client and made them aware of our plan;
  • A business Analyst from the client side was identified and was made the product Owner; he was given some briefing on SCRUM;
  • The team size was 4 so one of the developers had to share the load of SCRUM Master; his time was split between both the roles;
  • We decided to have a three week sprint.

2. Challenges


  • We had lot of defects in the first Sprint delivery;
  • In the Sprint retrospective we found out the team had committed to deliver lot of product backlog and skipped to do code reviews;
  • Team had to be educated the “Definition of Done”;
  • From Second Sprint onwards project stared to settle down.

3. Six technical Practices were adapted in the Organization


  • Version control system was Put in Place;
  • Continuous Integration system was adapted, so we did not find it difficult during the last day of delivery;
  • Automated test scripts were built; used freeware automation tool to build scripts;
  • Refactoring of source code was done to implement new functionality;
  • As the requirements were versatile, design was planned to that sprint, so design was kept simple;
  • Team was made aware that the code is owned collectively and each team member was responsible of the entire build.

4. Results


  • Management team understood the importance of a Process implementation across organization;
  • Pilot project was successful and customer believed that they saved 10% on the budgeted cost;
  • Confidence of Delivery & Management team increased;
  • It became easy to win more projects as they pitched in as a Process oriented Organization;
  • Involvement of Business users has reduced defects.