Baby Steps toward Scrum: How BabyCenter.com Made the Cultural Transition to Agile Software Development BabyCenter.com’s website pioneers some of the most interactive and engaging tools for parents and parents-to-be, with birth announcements, customized pregnancy calendars, a baby names finder, emails timed to child development stages, and tips to help parents survive an eight-hour plane ride with children. Like many internet companies, however, it started in a very fragile, understaffed, and chaotic development environment. Its network operations team consisted of just three people, and programming staff spent 85 percent of their time fighting fires and fixing bugs. Priorities for developing the site’s new features kept changing, and attempts to use the waterfall method were frustrated by delays in nailing down requirements and delivering design specs. Something had to change. While recovering from back surgery, the company’s VP for engineering read about agile development, particularly Scrum. Intrigued, he started a pilot project. The Scrum team held daily stand-up meetings, usually 15 minutes or less. The “product owner,” who was the business manager from the department requesting the new features, collaborated closely with the developers to prioritize requirements. The pilot worked well, but the company’s developers continued to struggle with competing priorities, complaining that they were splitting their time 50/50/50: “I’m spending 50 percent of my time on Project X, 50 percent on Project Y, and 50 percent on Project Z.” Developers were still racing between projects and maintenance activities, and most were engaging in “cowboy coding,” bypassing access controls and good programming practices to quickly fix bugs and get at least a few new features installed. In the next phase, the VP demanded a more disciplined approach, blocking the developers out of the production system and drawing on Scrum principles. The most wrenching cultural change was management’s drive to clear the company’s backlog of requirements and establish priorities based on their strategic value to competitive advantage, return on investment, or risk management. Previously, business stakeholders would individually bring ideas to the developers, who did their best to decide which to work on first. The shift to using strategic value, risk management, and ROI to prioritize projects dismayed managers whose requirements were pushed down the list, but it ensured that developers would work on high-value projects rather than managers’ personal agendas. Now developers could say, “Sorry, that’s not on my sprint. Go see the product owner.” More Scrum features were adopted, such as the full-time assignment of a product owner and at least two developers on every team. Product owners became accustomed to deeper involvement in the features they were requesting, attending the stand-up meetings and working much more closely with the software than before. Some of the developers had been used to the freedom of choosing which projects they thought were important, but they came to appreciate the value of Scrum’s structure. The Scrum sprints provided another way to add discipline to BabyCenter’s software development environment. Managers came to respect the planning meetings because they knew that requirements are fixed once the sprint starts. They also took more pains to review the software early to avoid winding up with something that wasn’t what they wanted but couldn’t immediately change. BabyCenter started with baby steps, but gradually it put into place a highly disciplined agile development environment that ensures its software projects align with business priorities. The results speak for themselves, as they do in other companies that have adopted agile software methods. The company has won numerous Webby Awards, testifying to the success of its software development strategies. Discussion Questions 11-21. Describe the previous software development process at BabyCenter.com. 11-22. Describe the new software development process at BabyCenter.com. How has the software development process changed? 11-23. What cultural changes were required for BabyCenter.com employees to adapt to the new software development process? 11-24. What might BabyCenter.com business stakeholders and developers not like about the new software development process? How could BabyCenter.com executives respond to these concerns?
Baby Steps toward Scrum: How BabyCenter.com Made the Cultural Transition to Agile Software Development
BabyCenter.com’s website pioneers some of the most interactive and engaging tools for parents and parents-to-be, with birth announcements, customized pregnancy calendars, a baby names finder, emails timed to child development stages, and tips to help parents survive an eight-hour plane ride with children. Like many internet companies, however, it started in a very fragile, understaffed, and chaotic development environment. Its network operations team consisted of just three people, and
Something had to change. While recovering from back surgery, the company’s VP for engineering read about agile development, particularly Scrum. Intrigued, he started a pilot project. The Scrum team held daily stand-up meetings, usually 15 minutes or less. The “product owner,” who was the business manager from the department requesting the new features, collaborated closely with the developers to prioritize requirements. The pilot worked well, but the company’s developers continued to struggle with competing priorities, complaining that they were splitting their time 50/50/50: “I’m spending 50 percent of my time on Project X, 50 percent on Project Y, and 50 percent on Project Z.” Developers were still racing between projects and maintenance activities, and most were engaging in “cowboy coding,” bypassing access controls and good programming practices to quickly fix bugs and get at least a few new features installed.
In the next phase, the VP demanded a more disciplined approach, blocking the developers out of the production system and drawing on Scrum principles. The most wrenching cultural change was management’s drive to clear the company’s backlog of requirements and establish priorities based on their strategic value to competitive advantage, return on investment, or risk management. Previously, business stakeholders would individually bring ideas to the developers, who did their best to decide which to work on first. The shift to using strategic value, risk management, and ROI to prioritize projects dismayed managers whose requirements were pushed down the list, but it ensured that developers would work on high-value projects rather than managers’ personal agendas. Now developers could say, “Sorry, that’s not on my sprint. Go see the product owner.”
More Scrum features were adopted, such as the full-time assignment of a product owner and at least two developers on every team. Product owners became accustomed to deeper involvement in the features they were requesting, attending the stand-up meetings and working much more closely with the software than before. Some of the developers had been used to the freedom of choosing which projects they thought were important, but they came to appreciate the value of Scrum’s structure.
The Scrum sprints provided another way to add discipline to BabyCenter’s software development environment. Managers came to respect the planning meetings because they knew that requirements are fixed once the sprint starts. They also took more pains to review the software early to avoid winding up with something that wasn’t what they wanted but couldn’t immediately change.
BabyCenter started with baby steps, but gradually it put into place a highly disciplined agile development environment that ensures its software projects align with business priorities. The results speak for themselves, as they do in other companies that have adopted agile software methods. The company has won numerous Webby Awards, testifying to the success of its software development strategies.
Discussion Questions
11-21. Describe the previous software development process at BabyCenter.com.
11-22. Describe the new software development process at BabyCenter.com. How has the software development process changed?
11-23. What cultural changes were required for BabyCenter.com employees to adapt to the new software development process?
11-24. What might BabyCenter.com business stakeholders and developers not like about the new software development process? How could BabyCenter.com executives respond to these concerns?
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