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: Where is the decision-making coming from?

Benefield: The way it works is that the Scrummaster is the person who understands the process mostly and coaches the team to follow the processes. We have an international coaching team, which is the one I run. So we work with the teams to kick them off; then drop into some team meetings and check up with them. But the team will be very self-adjusting. We have something called "the retrospective" at the end of each iteration, and that's the time for the team to look at their process and say what's working, what's not and do we need to change. When they have failures, we usually get involved to help them out.

KM: What was the experience that turned Yahoo toward Agile and Scrum development?

Benefield: Some companies come from very heavy bureaucratic processes. Yahoo started as a small startup and then they grew very quickly. What they were doing initially was very Agile, so the founders would be in the same room working on the software. Then, as they grew, they got to the point where they needed to communicate more. At that point, they came up with a traditional waterfall process. Waterfall tends to be put in place where people want something more formalized. It looks good on paper and it's very easy to write up and distribute, so it looks wonderful. But it was hard to implement that because we had a startup culture. We had very smart, creative people [and] they are used to just getting their ideas out. This was very unnatural to them. No one liked it. It was slowing them down. An engineer on the team started doing some evangelism, saying "Hey, we should be more Agile." We acquired a search company and they were into Scrum. It played on people's needs for a more lightweight process. So in February of 2005, we kicked off the first pilot teams [of Agile development].

KM: How do you become certified?

Benefield: The Scrum Alliance organization. There are about 50 certified Scrum trainers globally. It's a very small community. I've worked a lot with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, who were the co-creators of Scrum. I was probably trainer No. 14 at the time.

KM: Is it true that applications get out the door quicker with Agile development?

Benefield: Just the fact that [we are] building software very early on [and] we don't take months to do planning--that tends to get software out faster in the first place. Productivity-wise, Agile teams that I've worked with, especially when I've done a lot of coaching with them, I can easily get 200 to 300 percent productivity improvements. Some teams do extremely well because they've really adopted Agile. They follow all of the practices extremely well. Other teams that may not have as much training and coaching or there are systemic blocks--then you might not see as much [improvement]. We see a range, and overall--looking at the worst teams--we're seeing around 35 percent to 36 percent productivity improvement. All things, considered, that's a fairly conservative estimate.