program selection system

Salesforce.com’s R&D organization made a comprehensive large scale transition to agile software development in October 2006. Since that time we have delivered five on-time major releases of our Salesforce application suite and Force.com platform using the new agile approach. There are currently over 40 scrum teams contributing to each major release, and all teams work in a single release code branch. When combined with an aggressive, risk-tolerant culture, this results in many team interdependencies.

Single team implementations are where Scrum is most comfortable. Having successfully adopted Scrum for single teams within the central BBC Future Media and Technology department, we were now faced with the choice of dropping the use of Scrum on a large multi-team project or scaling Scrum up. We chose the latter, despite the fact that neither we nor anyone else seemed to know exactly what was involved. This is the story of how we dragged Scrum kicking and screaming out of its (and our) Comfort Zone.