Ed Willis

Although I've favored iterative software development approaches throughout my career as a software developer, architect and manager, it was really only about five years ago that I got started with Scrum. Since then, I and my teams have enjoyed great success in some pretty wide-ranging fields including internal tools, process development and training development projects. Scrum was the foundation allowing us to grow a team of 28 people quickly while continuing to deliver on time and on quality on a fast-expanding portfolio of projects and services.

Scrum has also been a major subject of our work. We've developed Scrum process assets and Scrum training and have worked diligently to find effective compromises between Scrum, ISO9001 and the CMMI. For example, we developed agile tailorings of our processes that allow Scrum teams to do their work in accordance with our ISO9001 quality management system while continuing to enjoy the benefits of their Scrum deployment. We've worked with a growing set of Scrum stakeholders to choose and deploy Scrum tools. We've provided very popular Scrum coaching offerings that have helped drive Scrum adoption throughout the organization – when we started, Scrum project were unheard-of, but now they total some 20% of all projects in our organization.

As well as a CSM, CSPO and CSC, I'm also an SEI-authorized SCAMPI B&C Team Lead appraiser and as such, I've spent a great deal of time thinking through how the CMMI and Scrum can (and can't) be effectively combined to leverage each approach's strengths.

I've been blogging over on O'Reilly for a while and hope to publish some articles on the Scrum Alliance site in the near future.

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