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Continuous SCRUM: agile management of SAAS products

Published: 24 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Hosted software-as-a-service products provide an opportunity to provide consumers with continuous deployment of new features, as opposed to scheduled version upgrades as is the norm for products installed on-premise. In order to exploit this opportunity, a SaaS provider needs to adopt an agile process that is capable of releasing new features rapidly. The SCRUM [5,6] process is ideally suited for this purpose: However, when SCRUM has been used for agile development of an installed product, parallel, overlapping 'sprints' are executed by separate teams, each dealing with short, medium, and longer-term enhancements to the product[3]; with the result that version upgrades are therefore easier to manage. In contrast, in the case of a SAAS product, version upgrades are no longer a constraint, so we can do better. In this paper we describe 'Continuous SCRUM', a variant of Type-C SCRUM, augmented with engineering best practices, in a manner ideally suited for managing SAAS products. In our approach, bug-fixes, minor enhancements, as well as major features are released continuously, on a weekly basis by a single team, in contrast to "Meta-SCRUM" [3]. We also present field data from our experience with using Continuous SCRUM for a hosted platform-as-a-service product for more than two years. Our experience reinforces other recent evidence [11] that rapid, smaller releases are often preferable to infrequent, larger ones. Continuous SCRUM provides a mechanism to achieve and sustain a rapid release cycle, for SAAS products as well as, we believe, for custom applications developed in-house.

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Poole, D. (2008). "Breaking the major release habit". ACM Queue, 4(8), 46--51.
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Daniela Damian and James Chisan "An Empirical Study of the Complex Relationships between Requirements Engineering Processes and Other Processes that Lead to Payoffs in Productivity, Quality, and Risk Management" IEEE Transaction of Software Engineering, Vol 32, No. 7, July 2006.
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Paul D. Hamerman, Connie Moore and Ralph Vitti "Application Upgrades: How To Make Upgrade Decisions When Business Value proves Elusive" Forrester June 25th, 2010
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P. Berander, "Evolving Prioritization for Software Product Management", ser. Blekinge Institute of Technology Doctoral Dissertation Series. Blekinge Institute of Technology, 2007.
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Adopting Continuous Deployment in a Public Administration Project: An Industrial Case StudyProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement. Industry-, Workshop-, and Doctoral Symposium Papers10.1007/978-3-031-78392-0_6(84-99)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2024
  • (2023)A modeling language for novice engineers to design well at SaaS product companiesProceedings of the 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference10.1145/3578527.3578548(1-5)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Tailoring the Scrum framework for software developmentInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106814146:COnline publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ISEC '11: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
February 2011
229 pages
ISBN:9781450305594
DOI:10.1145/1953355
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 February 2011

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Author Tags

  1. PAAS
  2. SAAS
  3. SCRUM
  4. agile process
  5. configuration management
  6. continuous deployment
  7. release management

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ISEC '11
Sponsor:
  • Computer Society of India
ISEC '11: Indian Software Engineering Conference
February 24 - 27, 2011
Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India

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Overall Acceptance Rate 76 of 315 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Adopting Continuous Deployment in a Public Administration Project: An Industrial Case StudyProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement. Industry-, Workshop-, and Doctoral Symposium Papers10.1007/978-3-031-78392-0_6(84-99)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2024
  • (2023)A modeling language for novice engineers to design well at SaaS product companiesProceedings of the 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference10.1145/3578527.3578548(1-5)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Tailoring the Scrum framework for software developmentInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106814146:COnline publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Introduction to the Metrics ThemeAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_9(155-161)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Chapter 6 Lightweight Consistency Checking for Agile Model-Based Development in PracticeAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_8(131-151)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Chapter 5 Expectations and Challenges from Scaling Agile in Mechatronics-Driven Companies – A Comparative Case StudyAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_7(119-130)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Chapter 4 Technical Debt Tracking: Current State of Practice: A Survey and Multiple Case Study in 15 Large OrganizationsAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_6(87-118)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Introduction to the Continuous Architecture ThemeAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_5(85-86)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Chapter 3 Efficient and Effective Exploratory Testing of Large-Scale Software SystemsAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_4(51-81)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Chapter 2 Modeling Continuous Integration Practice Differences in Industry Software DevelopmentAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_3(23-49)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
  • Show More Cited By

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