BOOSTING PRODUCTIVITY: ‘SCRUM’ AT PLAY, BE IT RUGBY OR SOFTWARE AT INFOSPACE

Anjali Prayag, Bangalore, April 27, 2009
The Hindu Business Line

Employees at Infospace India may never have played rugby but they all have the expertise to get the ‘ball back into play.’

Scrum, a term borrowed from the rugby field, is an iterative incremental process of software development and is practised by everyone at the Bangalore-based Web design and applications company.

“It has been a full-blown practice here for the last three-and-a-half years and we have seen 200-300 percent productivity improvement during the period,” says Srishti Sofat, Country Manager, Infospace.

In rugby, scrum is where the whole team acts together with every member moving with everyone else to push the ball down the field. In a software company, the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team across different phases of a project — meaning evaluating the team’s process and changing its tactics if one method isn’t working.

Scrum follows the agile development principle and provides a seamless methodology to bind not just the processes but also the team members. The priority here is customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Agile processes use change for the customer’s competitive advantage, incorporating changes, even late in the development process.

The main roles in a scrum are the scrum master, who maintains the processes and works as a project manager; the product owner who represents the stakeholders; and the ‘team’ consisting of developers.

At InfoSpace, the team involved in a project does a 15-minute scrum before resuming the day’s work. Apart from the regular updates, the meeting enables the team members in understanding about “not how one has worked but how much he or she has lagged behind.” This will help team members take measures to keep pace with the rest of the team.

“This puts pressure on employees to perform as they have to announce what they did the previous day,” according to Sofat. This methodology is especially relevant for Infospace because it is an Internet-based company and fast moving processes work well for the company, she explains.