Buried at the tail end of yet another which-portal’s-on-top? feature in the Times is this interesting tidbit about software development practices at Yahoo:
Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of creating products. Like most big companies, it used to develop software by first creating a comprehensive design that defined how features would be written and tested. Instead, it is now trying what is known as a scrum method, where it will plan, build and test parts of a product every 30 days.
“We may not know how everything fits together,†Mr. Patel said. But by creating partly completed products that can be shown to customers, “We can get insights from users and react to that over a three- or four-month period to put it all together,†he said.
Scrum is a species of agile software development in which the development team, among other things, holds quick daily meetings and delivers new bits of functioning software on very short schedules. It’s all about “moving the ball forward,” scrum expert Ken Schwaber says.
[tags]software, software development, yahoo, google, scrum[/tags]
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