Presentation: "Scrum@Nokia"

Time: Wednesday 14:30 - 15:30

Location: Conference Hall 2

Abstract: Stories from the Flexible Company

A couple years ago, Bas started a small project in Nokia Networks which was called Flexible R&D. It's goal was to introduce Agile and Iterative development in the company. Nobody expected anything from it, but it turned out to probably be the largest change the R D department of Nokia Networks (now NSN) has been going through. From a small project called Flexible R &D, it went to a large project called Flexible Company and working together with almost all the products that are developed in NSN (Nokia Networks merged in 2007 with Siemens Com, creating a large company called NSN).

From a small unimportant project to a large change project was quite a journey with lots of stories. This presentation will tell a couple of the stories about the journey. Stories which have to do with organizational change. How did it start? How did it fail? How about metrics? or CMMi? or tools? or training? For an hour, Bas will select the stories which the audience finds most interesting and tell what happened.

Bas Vodde, NSN

Bas Vodde

Bas is originally from Holland, however has lived in China, Finland and is currently again living in China. In the 90s he worked as a developer in Holland and felt a mismatch between what he experienced as working and between "what the official literature said you should do". That was solved with the introduction of Extreme Programming and evenmore so, with Agile Development in general.

In the beginning of 2001, he had enough of the "normal life" and moved to China where he started working for Nokia. Here, he gained experience on very large projects and the traditional ways they are run. After this he became even more convinced that Agile Development is the way forward, for all size projects.

In 2005 he moved to Helsinki, Finland to introduce Agile Development and in particular Scrum, in Nokia Networks. For two years he watched dozens of teams adopt scrum and other agile practices. Recently, he moved back to one larger project to focus on a smaller scope.

His main interests are in Scrum and especially how to use it within large companies and large projects. He also focuses much on the technical practices, especially test-driven development (including refactoring) and continuous integration because he strongly believes you need a well-factored code base if you want to be fast and flexible. His hobby interests have been lean production and quality management and, of course, programming.