Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

by Jeff Sutherland

The launch of Healthcare.gov, the website where Americans are supposed to be able to sign up for health insurance, is a great example. The front end was beautiful. It was clever, clear—a great design. It was completed in three months using Scrum. The back end, though—that was the debacle. It simply didn’t work. It was supposed to hook up databases in the IRS to state databases, to insurance company databases, to the department of Health and Human Services. This is a complex piece of work. It involved more than twenty contractors working on different bits and pieces, and they planned it all using Waterfall techniques. They only tested the site at the very end for a few days, rather than doing incremental testing along the way.