Scrum – how to simulate a start up in a big company

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Yahoo! | 1 Comment

Although the rugby world cup takes place right now and UK television is full of it – the scrum I’m talking about is not related to this sport.

I’ve had the chance to attend a Yahoo! training this week in London, to learn scrum, an agile software development method.
There is tons of information out there if you want to get an idea of what scrum is.

The scrum development process – mountain goat software
Rescources – scrum alliance

For a basic understanding and in case you don’t have much time just read the scrum primer (16 pages PDF) – it will explain in a nutshell what scrum is and how it works.

Traditionally – especially in large companies the way to develop software follows a process that could be described as “waterfall”. After you research the market opportunity of an idea, you pitch for resources, product people will then describe the product requirements in a document and gather input from various departments like Design, Engineering, SEO, Legal, web development, quality testing etc.

Then product /product-manager project-manager/ will write product specifications – basically like the product requirements document just way more detailed.
Once this is signed off by all stakeholders – you are ready to go.

One of the weaknesses of this approach is the duration of the life cycles – In waterfall you will look into release cycles of ~3 month from start to launch.
Another one is that you barely have all the team members involved at the same time – except e.g. for the kick off meeting of your project. There are many more weak spots – and if you are working with waterfall in a big company I’m sure you could add some more instantly.

So how does agile software development cure these weaknesses?

In my own words a very short explanation for this would be – try to simulate a start-up in a big company.

With scrum you try to get all people involved from start to finish, you will work in so called sprints that are usually only 2 to 4 weeks long /not three month/ and at the end of each sprint you will have a shippable product. So instead of shipping one huge thing at the end of three month you will have three smaller releases in the same time.

This will allow you to

I’m looking forward to use this method in our upcoming releases.

  • Search – The #1 priority for the company
  • Google Maps to partner with GoYellow?
  • Art of the Start – Mantras and businessmodels
  • Bing TV ad – start ur engine …

    • Comments

    One Response to “Scrum – how to simulate a start up in a big company”

    1. SebNo Gravatar on September 24th, 2007 8:46 am

      Great post!
      Could not attend this meeting cause i did not know about :-D it but i’ve printed out the ’scrum primer’
      Thanks for this Frank :)

    Leave a Reply