program selection system

BabyCenter, LLC, a Johnson & Johnson operating company, has spent the past four years adopting agile processes. BabyCenter shares social community websites with millions of unique users a month receiving more than 100 million page views/month. The BabyCenter team began adopting Scrum in the spring of 2004. BabyCenter also has incorporated many concomitant Agile practices, including Continuous Integration, Test-Driven Development, automated functional testing with Fit, and pair-programming. The engineering teams run on two-week Sprints and roll code to production after every sprint. The team has evolved into Sprints with predictable, steady velocities and a comprehensive planning process wrapping the Scrum Sprints. All repeated tasks are highly automated, and production oncall events have dropped to nearly zero. A large fraction of release branches actually have no bugs in them, and there have been no rolled-back deployments in over a year.

But from what humble beginnings!

Four years ago, the team was tasked with more projects than actual developers, delivery dates were set in stone long before projects were scoped or staffed. Emergency bug fixes were pushed to production several times per week by developers, and sites were routinely impaired. Multitudinous business stakeholders had direct access to team members, deluging them with requests for projects, each more urgent than the previous (in progress, yet unfinished) one. Product management had a penchant for large, BDUF projects. Developers ran amok in production, creating ever more problems with clever “solutions” to operational difficulties.

This talk will cover BabyCenter’s journey from chaos to a relatively mature Agile organization.

Some themes we will hit on are:
- changes in development, operational, product management, and business stakeholder culture and behaviors
- the evolution of the planning process from set-in-stone dates to velocity-based prediction
- the importance of a great Product Owner
- experiments with various tracking technologies (cards, spreadsheets, full-blown product management tools)
- the difficulties in doing real functional Fit testing

We’ll then describe in detail BabyCenter’s current implementation of Scrum, including:
- a series of pre-Sprint planning and scoping meetings
- formal business stakeholder checkins during the Sprint
- a “two-bucket” product backlog: balancing short-term tactics with long-term strategy
- Sprint Breaks
- a process so repeatable that it became boring, and efforts to inject some chaos back into the Sprints
- a management team that no longer questions the teams velocity