Inter-organizational Co-development with Scrum: Experiences and Lessons Learned from a Distributed Corporate Development Environment

Distributed development within a single organization adds a lot of overhead to every software development process. When a second organization joins for co-development, complexity reaches the next level. This case study investigates an agile approach from a real world project involving two unaffiliated IT organizations that collaborate in a distributed development environment. Adaptations to the regular Scrum process are identified and evaluated over a six-month-long period of time. The evaluation involves a detailed problem root cause analysis and suggestions on what issues to act first. Key lessons learned include that team members of one Scrum team should not be distributed over several sites and that every site should have at least one Scrum master and one product owner.