Lessons from a Yahoo Scrum Rollout

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Lessons from a Yahoo Scrum Rollout

Yahoo's top coach in Agile practices describes the process, and how it speeds up Web application delivery

2/5/2008

By Kurt Mackie

KM: It sounds like Scrum has some variation per project, but there is a set of practices to Scrum, right?

Benefield: Yes, that's correct. There are some things you don't want to mess with too much, especially when a team starts out. For example, we have meetings every day for 15 minutes, called "the daily Scrum." And that's where the whole team talks about what they've achieved in the last meeting or what are we about to work on today, and is there anything that's blocking me. So people ask, "Why do we have to do this every day?" and "Can't we just do it a couple of times a week?" But there are critical benefits. One is that you always know where a project is, because we care about visibility. We…know on a day if something's wrong--the build's broken or the machines are down--[and] if that happens, we need to resolve it immediately. So it's a risk mitigation strategy. [Scrum includes] the notion of constant communication and visibility and the values we try to drive. It's not a market management technique--it's just a way for them to communicate and resolve problems together.

KM: I see you worked for CollabNet at one point. Is that sort of collaboration method used in Scrum?

Benefield: I do come from a big open source background and the idea of collaboration, [where] you could distribute to people all around the globe. The [CollabNet] tool really helped to get these people talking. My team worked very collaboratively and that's how we came to adapt the Agile concepts. It was the only way we could start software. We had to continuously know what state our software was in. We were continuously building it and releasing it in small chunks. So a lot of those things very much influenced me in the Agile movement.

KM: A lot of developers may want to work solitary, but that seems to be part of the problem with these software projects. Is Scrum just a way to keep people engaged in meeting the project's goals?

Benefield: Well, I think one of the key points of why this works is that we are dealing with people. We tend to boil the software development process down to the tools we are using, complicated tracking methods, check lists and task allocation--saying, "You work on this; you work on that." Things that are very demotivating. But people will actually self-organize. For example, we let the team do the planning. The business will come to you and say, "These are our priorities. This is what's important. This is what we want to do." The team will decide how they want to do it. So instead of having the traditional project manager say, "Here's your task, do this--how long is it going to take?" We say, "You work out the tasks," and people volunteer for them, and they help each other. You know "Scrum" comes from rugby. The team can only score a goal if the team works together.