ent rigor we could see significant differences in Scrum
adoption and acceptance among the areas.
To learn about the effects of lean development as
implemented at SAP, the company chose to partici-
pate in the DIWA-IT study about health protection in
the IT industry sponsored by the German Bundesmin-
isterium fr Bildung und Forschung and the European
Union. An ongoing research project is scheduled to
examine long-term effects.
We expect that after each product release the
maintenance effort will increase for a couple of
years when a new product gets widely adopted by
customers. As discussed in a recent case study this
maintenance effort requires additional considerations
when creating the product backlog (Vlaanderen et al.,
2009). We consider the “competition” between new-
product development and old-product maintenance
a challenge to the long-term acceptance of Scrum
at SAP. To counterbalance this effect organizational
measures might be advisable.
Introducing lean development is a learning pro-
cess which brings many problem areas to light. Many
observations made at SAP would not have been made
in the old environment. It is still too early to assess the
benefits of the ongoing change in completeness, but
the transparency of the development processes and
the broad acceptance of agile methods gained make
the change a worthwile effort. In addition to Scrum
SAP is in the process of applying more and more of
the developer-centered methods of Extreme Program-
ming, e. g. test-driven development, pair program-
ming, project metaphor, early code integration.
Looking back at the waterfall model that SAP
used for about 10 years, the authors found that the
biggest disadvantage of that model is not that it makes
it impossible to correct errors at a later stage, but the
strong impact the model has on organizationand com-
munication. The waterfall model suppresses commu-
nication along its path. Experts for one phase only
communicate with experts for other phases through
highly formalized documents and status data. Infor-
mal communication is regarded as undermining the
model’s simplicity. Unfortunately this attitude de-
stroys the only remaining risk mitigation strategy left:
communication.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The change described in this paper could not be car-
ried out without a solid fundament of determined col-
leagues willing to accept delay and hardship while
moving forward. In particular we wish to name
Martin Fassunge, Alexander Gerber, Bernhard Grne,
Christiane Kuntz-Mayr, Christian Schmidkonz, and
Jrgen Staader whose contributions were outstanding.
We also would like to thank Jrgen Mller of the Hasso
Plattner Institute for his support to run the Scrum scal-
ing experiments.
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