From RUP to Scrum in an Internet company - UOL

October, 2010

UOL

Transition of development teams from RUP to Scrum

Friday, November 5, 2010

UOL – www.uol.com.br

• Brazilian portal created in 1996 – news, e-commerce, Internet access, e-mail and advertising

• UOL is the largest portal written in Portuguese

• The most visited portal in Latin America


What is UOL?

• 2.5 million of subscribers

• 7 million of active mailboxes

• 4.3 billion of page views

• 75% reach of Brazilian Internet

• Tens of scrum teams


Why should we change from RUP to something else?

• Do the business departments have a good relationship with you?

• How much energy is wasted discussing requirements change instead of producing value?

• Can you see the products being delivered easier as long as company invests more money to do them?


Why Scrum?

• I didn’t believe firstly

• Mike Cohn session – SDWest

• Book

• Qcon nov/07–Scrum master

TrainingFriday, November 5, 2010

How the upper management was convinced to use scrum?

• Giving examples in the same kind of business – Yahoo!, Google

• Explaining the reasons why Scrum is considered business driven–Functional development–Short iterations–Product backlog prioritization



• Showing good pictures

• Thks to gojko.net for the picture



Roadmap Tasks Planning Work Inspection

2 weeks

Work Demo release

Retro






How Scrum was implemented?

• Introduce people from other areas–Operation–Database–QA–Functional Manager–Financial, HR and Law



• Start deep discussions with different groups separately before start– Operations– Developers– QA– Eligible scrum masters– Functional managers



• Selection of consultancy – choose people that want to discuss real problems

• SPRiNT iT (Andreas Schliep)



• One of each project type in your company–UOL has 3 types

• Choose between new systems and existing systems–Existing systems revealed more

problems at UOL


Know how to explain

Read



• Introductory training 1 day - 21 people– Different skills and roles

• Eligible ScrumMasters• Business People• Developers• Webmasters• QA• Database Administrators and Developers• Operations


Scrum Team Training


Session with QA

• QA part of team• User stories• Acceptance Tests• Automation• Agile test plan



• Start as soon as possible– Prioritized Backlog (at least themes) – Vision– It’s not possible to resolve all the problems

before starting – sometimes people don’t know they have problems

• Scrum will demand improvements naturally– Better user stories– More efficiency in testing and delivering


Sprint Planning todaOferta



• Weekly meetings with upper management (ETC)

• Scrum master group

• List of common impediments

• Scrum master of scrum masters


Coaching Goals

• Better communication

• Focused development

• Frequent value generation

• Increased transparency

• Productivity improvement


Proposed Activities

• Train all team members in Scrum basics

• Work with the teams to create agile project plans

• Coach the respective teams

• Provide Certified ScrumMaster training


Schedule

Phase I -March Phase II - April Phase III - May


Phase I - Results

• Started PagSeguro, Atenas, todaOferta

• Prepared RadioUOL, UOLHost

• Discussed QA, usability and database development issues

• Initiated ScrumMaster group

• Performed 2 team trainings


Phase I - Impediments

• Backlog creation and prioritization

• Missing automated acceptance tests

• ITIL protocols slow down deployment


Phase I - Impediments

• People not 100% dedicated to team

• Missing Company Backlog

• Required ScrumMaster training

• Collaborative work space setup


Time for Deployment


Phase II - Results

• Started RadioUOL, Babel, PagSeguro

• Prepared 5 others

• Continued ScrumMaster group

• Performed 2 team trainings

• Scrum master training


Sprint Planning RadioUOL


Daily Scrum todaOferta


Phase II - Impediments

• Team not ready to start

• Meeting room availability

• Quality of backlog items

• Controlling of Scrum projects unclear

• Performance appraisals


Phase III - Results

• 2 Scrum for Executives sessions

• 1 Agile Quality Management session

• Continued ScrumMaster group

• Prepared other project


Phase III - Results

• Started 3 others

• Refined running teams

• 2 Scrum Team Trainings


Daily Scrums


Sprint Retrospective uolMais


Sprint Planning uolMais


Scrum Team Training


Task Board Babel

• Evolution of practice

• Vertical arrangement

• Different colours for different types

• Team calendar

• Sprint Burndown


Changes and Results

• almost every team using scrum

• Dedicated people to each team – most of times– Decrease of functional management– Keep the functional managers mentoring and defining standards

• Better communication/relationship with business departments

• ITIL Change Management Optimization – About 30 changes/week

• Release Planning and Reporting

• 2 or 3-week sprints


Advices

Get empowermentto change


Advices

Understand thewhole productenvironment


Advices

Don’t acceptexcuses• No scrumbut• Empathy yes,

complacence no• Know How to

convince people


Advices

Keeping improving

• SMG (one hour/week)

• Agile engineering

• Let everybody know that we can do it better


Advices

Announce Rules andContainer (Mike Cohn)

• best practices

• don’t confuse them with micro management


Advices

Watch and protect thechange

• Anonymous poll

• Ask the team, scrum masters and product owners– dont’t let the bad

networking coming up

• Start fast, but few environments (teams+contexts)

• dodge already promised dates


Thanks

• Gabrielle Benefield

• Andreas Schliep • Yahoo! people• UOL board of

directors• UOL –

courageous people


Perguntas?

Alexandre dos Santos, [email protected]@alexmoitta

Andreas Schliep, [email protected]

http://uol.com/trabalhe


mailto:[email protected]




Technology

From RUP to Scrum in an Internet company - UOL