Agile Development Blog

Scott Killen is an Agile Practice Leader at PayPal and the President of Agile Austin. He has extensive experience managing all aspects of the software development process, from a twinkle-in-the-eye to final release. In advance of his participation as a panelist at our upcoming Dallas Agile Success Tour, we sat down with Scott to chat about Agile.

1. How have you implemented Agile across your organization?

We have a three-year vision for PayPal to implement Agile development across our enterprise. In year one, we are focusing on basic practices. The idea is to lay a solid foundation for building mature teams. In year two, we’ll focus on making teams successful. That is, using the practices in a reinforcing way to build teams that predictably deliver acceptable products. In year three, we want to focus on optimization. That is, aggressively practicing incremental and continuous improvement of our Agile practices.

To baseline practices and measure improvement in year one, we have a metric that we call “Team Maturity.” This is a weighted score that reflects the number of fundamental practices a team employs and their longevity in terms of iterations completed.

We are in the process of defining the metrics we wish to use to define a successful team. It is important to us that these metrics be methodology neutral. Although not formalized, I expect that some measure of time-to-market and released-defect counts will be used.

2. What was your #1 reason for adopting Agile development?

We want more flexibility in our development process.  We seek flexibility to make late-cycle changes to develop the best product and to decrease time-to-market for those products.

3. What has been the biggest benefit of adopting Agile?

We’re looking forward to receiving the big payoffs. But, surveys generally indicate that we are more effective when we develop in Agile projects, our quality is higher, and our developers are happier.  Cross-functional communication is cited as the big win in these surveys.

4. What one piece of advice would you give to new Agile teams?

Be sure to properly set management expectations. You will not get productivity or quality gains at first, and, in fact, your productivity will decline for about six iterations until everyone begins to learn how to work collaboratively within the Agile framework. Agile development does not come without pain. I’m reminded of the expression “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”  That’s Agile – painful, but the results are worth it.

5. How do you define Agile success? Can you do it in 113 characters?

Happier customers measured by Net Promoter scores. Happier developers measured by lower turnover.

Follow this thread on Twitter - We asked Scott to define Agile success in 113 characters or less as part of a challenge we’re hosting on Twitter. What is your definition of Agile success in 113 characters or less? Tweet your answer to @RallySoftware using #AgileSuccess. The top five tweets received by May 17th will be featured in a follow-up blog post.