This document discusses UOL's transition from the Rational Unified Process (RUP) methodology to Scrum. It describes how upper management was convinced to adopt Scrum by showing examples from other companies and explaining Scrum's benefits. The implementation involved training employees, starting pilot projects, and addressing impediments over multiple phases. Challenges included preparing backlogs and ensuring team dedication. Overall, the transition resulted in improved communication, more frequent deliveries, and almost all teams adopting Scrum.
1. UOL
Transition of development teams
from RUP to Scrum
October, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
2. 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
3. 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
4. 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?
Friday, November 5, 2010
5. Why Scrum?
• I didn’t believe
firstly
• Mike Cohn
session – SDWest
• Book
• Qcon nov/07
– Scrum master
Training
Friday, November 5, 2010
6. 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
7. How the upper management was
convinced to use scrum?
• Showing good
pictures
• Thks to gojko.net for
the picture
Friday, November 5, 2010
8. How the upper management was
convinced to use scrum?
Work
Demo
release
Roadmap Planning Tasks Work Inspection Retro
2 weeks
Friday, November 5, 2010
9. How the upper management was
convinced to use scrum?
Friday, November 5, 2010
10. How the upper management was
convinced to use scrum?
Friday, November 5, 2010
11. How Scrum was implemented?
• Introduce people from other areas
– Operation
– Database
– QA
– Functional Manager
– Financial, HR and Law
Friday, November 5, 2010
12. How Scrum was implemented?
• Start deep discussions with different
groups separately before start
– Operations
– Developers
– QA
– Eligible scrum masters
– Functional managers
Friday, November 5, 2010
13. How Scrum was implemented?
• Selection of consultancy – choose
people that want to discuss real
problems
• SPRiNT iT (Andreas Schliep)
Friday, November 5, 2010
14. How Scrum was implemented?
• 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
15. Know how to explain
Read
Friday, November 5, 2010
16. How Scrum was implemented?
• Introductory training 1 day - 21 people
– Different skills and roles
• Eligible ScrumMasters
• Business People
• Developers
• Webmasters
• QA
• Database Administrators and Developers
• Operations
Friday, November 5, 2010
18. Session with QA
• QA part of team
• User stories
• Acceptance Tests
• Automation
• Agile test plan
Friday, November 5, 2010
19. How Scrum was implemented?
• 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
21. How Scrum was implemented?
• Weekly meetings with upper
management (ETC)
• Scrum master group
• List of common impediments
• Scrum master of scrum masters
Friday, November 5, 2010
22. Coaching Goals
• Better communication
• Focused development
• Frequent value generation
• Increased transparency
• Productivity improvement
Friday, November 5, 2010
23. 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
24. Schedule
Phase I -March Phase II - April Phase III - May
Friday, November 5, 2010
25. Phase I - Results
• Started PagSeguro, Atenas, todaOferta
• Prepared RadioUOL, UOLHost
• Discussed QA, usability and database
development issues
• Initiated ScrumMaster group
• Performed 2 team trainings
Friday, November 5, 2010
26. Phase I - Impediments
• Backlog creation and prioritization
• Missing automated acceptance tests
• ITIL protocols slow down deployment
Friday, November 5, 2010
27. Phase I - Impediments
• People not 100% dedicated to team
• Missing Company Backlog
• Required ScrumMaster training
• Collaborative work space setup
Friday, November 5, 2010
29. Phase II - Results
• Started RadioUOL, Babel, PagSeguro
• Prepared 5 others
• Continued ScrumMaster group
• Performed 2 team trainings
• Scrum master training
Friday, November 5, 2010
32. Phase II - Impediments
• Team not ready to start
• Meeting room availability
• Quality of backlog items
• Controlling of Scrum projects unclear
• Performance appraisals
Friday, November 5, 2010
33. Phase III - Results
• 2 Scrum for Executives sessions
• 1 Agile Quality Management session
• Continued ScrumMaster group
• Prepared other project
Friday, November 5, 2010
34. Phase III - Results
• Started 3 others
• Refined running teams
• 2 Scrum Team Trainings
Friday, November 5, 2010
39. Task Board Babel
• Evolution of practice
• Vertical arrangement
• Different colours for
different types
• Team calendar
• Sprint Burndown
Friday, November 5, 2010
40. 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
41. Advices
Get empowerment
to change
Friday, November 5, 2010
42. Advices
Understand the
whole product
environment
Friday, November 5, 2010
43. Advices
Don’t accept
excuses
• No scrumbut
• Empathy yes,
complacence no
• Know How to
convince people
Friday, November 5, 2010
44. Advices
Keeping improving
• SMG (one hour/week)
• Agile engineering
• Let everybody know that
we can do it better
Friday, November 5, 2010
45. Advices
Announce Rules and
Container (Mike Cohn)
• best practices
• don’t confuse them with
micro management
Friday, November 5, 2010
46. Advices
Watch and protect the
change
• 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
Friday, November 5, 2010
47. Thanks
• Gabrielle
Benefield
• Andreas Schliep
• Yahoo! people
• UOL board of
directors
• UOL –
courageous
people
Friday, November 5, 2010
48. Perguntas?
Alexandre dos Santos, alexst@uol.com.br
@alexmoitta
Andreas Schliep, andreas.schliep@googlemail.com
http://uol.com/trabalhe
Friday, November 5, 2010
Hinweis der Redaktion
We develop internet products such as webmail, authentication systems, biding systems, sponsored links applications. These applications must suport some hundreds of requests per second. We use mainly Java and Linux.
In July of 2007 we ‘ve noticed it was time to look for something different than RUP. We had trouble with the project customers, we were not increasing the deliveries as long as we are increasing investments. So we’ve decided to try agile processes. We chose Scrum because it looked more prepared to deal with business people. Besides Yahoo and Google were using it, at least partially. And this was very important to us.
I’ve decided to show to the upper management what it could be improved after some time studying scrum. I took care to say to them that scrum was not a silver bullet. Besides I told them if scrum did not work, we would have to continue using RUP. Any process is better than nothing.
The first row is more likely rup projects. The second one is more lilkely agile projects.
That was the picture that was more successful during the presentation. Business people said : OW!! I got it. That’s the thing we need. The president and CEO accepted.
The first row is more likely rup projects. The second one is more lilkely agile projects.
That was the picture that was more successful during the presentation. Business people said : OW!! I got it. That’s the thing we need. The president and CEO accepted.
We decided to contract a consultancy, after the upper management accepted the idea of change. Experience is very important to change a big ship journey. The ship is already sailing. You need to take care of the ongoing operations and projects.
We’ve discussed the proposal with Sprint-IT and it seemed that they were the right guys. Then we’ve picked up 3 projects to start. Each one having a differente type. Besides we’ve chosen between already deployed produtcts and new ones too. These choices made us to face different problems at the same time.
Of course, you can’t forget reading books. They were very important to me to justify the framwework the way it is, without being a ruler. You know, people start to refuse and ask changes in scrum after some time. It was very good to me knowing the basics and say why not to change the framework.
I started talking with focused groups presenting scrum and discussing the problems that the scrum change would bring to them.
We decided to contract a consultancy, after the upper management accepted the idea of change. Experience is very important to change a big ship journey. The ship is already sailing. You need to take care of the ongoing operations and projects.
We’ve discussed the proposal with Sprint-IT and it seemed that they were the right guys. Then we’ve picked up 3 projects to start. Each one having a differente type. Besides we’ve chosen between already deployed produtcts and new ones too. These choices made us to face different problems at the same time.
We decided to contract a consultancy, after the upper management accepted the idea of change. Experience is very important to change a big ship journey. The ship is already sailing. You need to take care of the ongoing operations and projects.
We’ve discussed the proposal with Sprint-IT and it seemed that they were the right guys. Then we’ve picked up 3 projects to start. Each one having a differente type. Besides we’ve chosen between already deployed produtcts and new ones too. These choices made us to face different problems at the same time.
Of course, you can’t forget reading books. They were very important to me to justify the framwework the way it is, without being a ruler. You know, people start to refuse and ask changes in scrum after some time. It was very good to me knowing the basics and say why not to change the framework.
I started talking with focused groups presenting scrum and discussing the problems that the scrum change would bring to them.
Besides scrum master training, we organized scrum introduction with different roles inside each group. Andreas will explain this more detailed.