Scrum tackles incapability and immaturity head-on

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

Then Ken Judy wrote, I would not invest in productivity measurement to justify agile adoption, saying...

"...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, level one of the Capability Maturity Model will cost even more, but I am still inclined to believe that Scrum would still prevail.

Jeff touted his combination of Scrum and CMMI Level 5 as "the Magic Potion for Code Warriors" at the 2008 International Conference on System Sciences in Hawaii.

From the podium there, Jeff said that this company maintains a diverse mix of projects in terms of size and platforms, but time and time again, his findings hold true.

Level 1 - Uncertainty. Success depends on individual effort.
Level 2 - Awakening. Basic project management practices are established.
Level 3 - Enlightenment. Standard process throughout organization.
Level 4 - Wisdom. Detailed metrics are collected and evaluated.
Level 5 - Certainty. Continuous process improvement via metrics feedback.

Ken Judy argued...

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.

Ken may have a point.

Since Decade Software is not one of the company's just pretending to follow Scrum, my judgement may be clouded—all the more reason to be fascinated with Jeff's findings.