Microsoft has learned some valuable lessons from Scrum

Microsoft adopted Scrum in 2005. Chris Flaat ran a great series of articles on implementing Scrum with his team at Microsoft, but actually there are dozens of teams throughout their company that are using it successfully—and they are delivering quality code on-time.

Today, Microsoft is such an advocate of Scrum, that they have released their free in-house Scrum management tool—something they call eScrum. It is described this way...

"eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help."

Some of you are thinking now...

"What about Windows Vista? It took forever to deliver, and it is not exactly bug-free."

Sadly—although Vista was one of the largest software projects in history—the Microsoft teams on that project did not use Scrum. The Longhorn Project was long underway when Microsoft began adopting Scrum, and many leaders were afraid to disrupt the process with something new and unproven.

Today, those who have used Scrum at Microsoft wish they had used Scrum for Vista. As Jeff Sutherland explained it...

"Scrum is built on truth, transparency, and trust and was designed to emulate the productivity of the Borland Quattro project where the each developer delivered 1000 lines of quality production C++ code per week. Vista only delivered 1000 lines per developer per year."

In the last few weeks, I have raved about the tremendous accomplishments of my team this year. They delivered quality code in record-breaking time. Jeff's quote above can help you understand how that happened. If Envision is Vista, EnvisionConnect is Quattro, and—just as all future Microsoft Windows projects will use Scrum—Decade Software will never forget the lessons we've learned this year.