Category: Scan-Agile

Lessons from the Yahoo!'s Scrum Adoption

November 14, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Tips and facts after from the company wide adoption of Scrum at Yahoo! Captured during the Gabrielle Benefield's keynote on Scan-Agile. During the adoption period, Gabrielle Benefield was Senior Director of Agile Development at Yahoo!, co-leading the company’s large-scale corporate adoption of Scrum, which now encompasses more than 200 teams projects and over 1,500 employees in the US, Europe, and India. Tips should be mostly applicable for similarly sized enterprises, though generally useful for smaller companies as well.

Secret sauce of offshoring and distribution - summary of Scan-Agile open space session

October 31, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

This Wednesday on the first Scandinavian Agile conference in Helsinki I was running an open space session about what works and what doesn't work with distributed and/or outsourcing teams. During the two hours we had an excellent discussion with many people in various roles from offshore customers to ones working in an outsourcing company to people being pushed to distribute, from product managers to Scrum Masters to developers.

A lot of the discussion results are intangible and stay in the heads of the participants and I didn't record the excellent discussion on feature teams VS component teams VS functional teams in the case of distribution. Here is the brief summary of what was commonly acknowledged to be working and not working in cases of offshoring and distribution. Use at your own risk.

Conference fever

October 28, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

I like going to the conferences. Every year I try taking part in one major conference and one or more smaller events devoted to the agile movement. Reading the books, articles and web-sites like this one is important, but I find that getting together on the conferences and similar types of gatherings is an own indispensable experience. If you happen to be at least moderately social, couple of conference days, lunches and evening parties help you get to know so many people and teams that you would not be able to meet in a year otherwise.

First Large Scandinavian Conference on Agile - Helsinki, October 29

August 13, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Picture courtesy of wili_hybrid@flickr

Today Scan-Agile, the first large North European conference opened its registration page. It is going to take place in Helsinki on October 29. It has an excellent set of speakers, that include Gabrielle Benefield - a former director of Agile development in Yahoo! and Bas Vodde - an expert on all things large scale. It has an open space, practitioner and awareness tracks and because of being run by a non-profit organization, it is cheap (just 200 euros). If you happen to be around Finland in the end of October, consider spending a day on the conference.

I was going to add some motivational story with a moral that would make you think about visiting a conference, but Vasco Duarte, one of the conference organizers and Agile expert with many years under the belt did it already. Go read his story about why his grandpas would love the conference and consider registering while there are still seats left.