For the past few years, the product development team at Blueshift has been operating in a waterfall development process. In this process, core product features and bug fixes would be grouped into large software releases which would be developed over the course of several months. While this process has worked okay, and we have delivered quality software, there were a number of areas that needed improvement, especially on-time delivery of releases.
Since January, we have been planning and developing the framework to switch the development team to an agile Scrum process. Scrum is a simple framework for agile software development which promotes strong team collaboration, and short iterative cycles that enable the team to deliver quickly, and respond to changing and new requirements. It’s a significant change from our old waterfall process, but there are many resources available online to assist in understanding and implementing Scrum (e.g. www.scrum.org).
In May we started our first three week sprint (which finished successfully in early June), and we are now most of the way through the second sprint. The process change has already brought about significant improvements, and we anticipate further benefits as we iterate and refine the process. A few of the key benefits we’ve seen so far are:
- The minimum turnaround time for releasing high priority product changes has dropped from 4-6 months to 3-6 weeks
- We can now have confidence in the delivery date for each sprint rather than constantly pushing back the delivery date due to scope creep and additional changes
- We can now quantify the productivity of the development team, and use this information to improve our process
- The development team is happier and more productive due to increased collaboration and ownership in the process
We’re looking forward to refining the Scrum process over time so we can continue to improve the quality of our software, and the speed with which we can provide changes and improvements to our clients.