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

It is also interesting that software developers often can be sort of loners; they're a little more introverted. So these [collaboration] tendencies come from engineering saying, "How can we do a lightweight way of communicating that people feel comfortable with." At first it's a little different. And when I introduce teams, I try to get them to sit together, and that's sometimes hard. They will be resistant, but after a while, they'll see the benefits--to talk and get feedback and work together.

KM: How do you define the project owners and the stake owners?

Benefield: The stakeholders are the people with a stake in the project. The ones who write the checks ultimately are the ones defining what they need. Obviously, being Yahoo, our consumers are our biggest focus. We care about the people using software.

Agile works a lot with techniques and requirements called user stories. In it, we talk about the types of users we have. We try to release small parts of our software--as well as during lab testing. We release small amounts to all of our customers, and of course we've got millions of them, and get them to test and ask, "Is this what you want?" And then we try a little bit more. It's like this taste-testing with Agile, which is really effective, because if it's not the right product, we know very quickly. We want to release it every month, a few features at a time. So we can say, "Are we meeting the needs," and as the market changes, that lets us be a little more flexible.

KM: Who are the chickens and who are the pigs in Agile development?

Benefield: If you are talking to Agile people and you want to start a flame war, talk about chicken and pigs. There's a big group called Scrum Development, and every six months someone will talk about chicken and pigs and it will start this huge flame war. Some people used it, especially in the early days, to talk about the idea that chickens are people who flap their wings and squawk, and make a lot of noise, and the pigs are the ones really doing the work in the trenches. It was [a story] to empower people. I had to use that in one company, however, at Yahoo, we are one big culture, and I want to break down those walls --so we cannot talk about chickens and pigs, except for referencing it in history. We have some guiding rules that we tend to be very good about-- including the business and sharing knowledge--so that we are not creating conflicts in the team.

KM: So who enforces that?

Benefield: "Enforcement" is an interesting word. There's a certain amount of control in it, saying, "You must do this." I'm more about people trying to understand the benefits [of meeting]. We're dealing with dotcom, very creative, very smart people. It's worse than an insult to tell them to just do it. So we tend to want to explain the reason and value behind it. Generally, we coach the teams. We work with them and show them the difference, so they get to experience the difference.