Homework 11, CS510, Fall 2006

Scrum, Due Monday Noon, Nov. 20, 60 points

Suppose you are the Chief Technology Officer of the 500-employee company, Software House, Inc., which builds custom applications for large financial companies. The typical project involves about 30-50 employees. These companies need a lot of agility and speed of development to respond to a rapidly changing marketplace, but also need high-quality software to avoid large financial losses from software defects.

Your President asks you to investigate the potential of adopting the agile method Scrum to improve agility and speed without large loss of quality.

Use the internet, the USC libraries, and other sources of information to prepare a pro-and-con table of bulleted items summarizing the advantages and difficulties of Scrum in this regard. For each bulleted item, append a referenced quotation from one of your sources substantiating the bulleted item.

Grading criteria will include the number and relevance of the bulleted items, the number and diversity of sources quoted, and the insightfulness of the bulleted points.