Improved Agile: A Customized Scrum Process for Project Management in Defense and Security

Abstract

This chapter describes our experience of adopting agile project management in a software development project in the defense context. Adopting an agile approach for both software development and the management of the consequent project is becoming increasingly more relevant in many domains, and the defense domain is no exception. However, this relevance does not by itself facilitate adoption as the defense environment is sometimes characterized as an unyielding culture where change is very difficult to effect. We addressed this characterization by obtaining strong unequivocal support from the top leadership, extending the standard scrum roles to fit within a hierarchical organization, and creating mixed teams of civilian consultants and military officers. This strategy was further supported by dedicated infrastructure consisting of specialized training, a suite of computer-aided software engineering tools, a structured governance community, and a custom agile doctrine. As a result of the introduction of our method, we obtained a marked improvement in development costs and project scope with a consequent sharp increase of customer satisfaction. The product has already been tested in an inter-force simulation with excellent results, which further confirms the feasibility of our method for mission-critical software systems for the Italian Armed Forces.