Cost Savings with Scrum

Jeff Sutherland published a paper at HICSS-41 that documents cost savings a CMMI level 5 organization delivers switching to Scrum.

As I just wrote, I would not invest in productivity measurement to justify agile adoption.

But a CMMI-5 company invests in more measurement than I would ever do so let’s take advantage of what they learned. While taking it with a grain of salt.

The company believes work costs about half as much if they use Scrum instead of their best of breed CMMI level 5 waterfall practice. For those of you who hate process, lack of a disciplined process (CMMI level 1) costs even more.

Jeff says this company does a diverse mix of work both in terms of size and platforms and that the results hold. I would want to know more about the company’s engineering practices both before and after but since Jeff is involved I’ll assume this is one of the small percentage of teams who claim to be doing Scrum that are really doing it.