Introducing Scrum into the Development of a News Portal

摘要

We describe the experience with introducing Scrum-based software development process to the web applications department of the largest Slovenian publishing house. Scrum was introduced within the scope of the project of rebuilding the news portal of their major daily newspaper. The paper describes preparatory activities before the start of the project, the application of Scrum practices during the project, and lessons learned. The use of Scrum proved to be beneficial due to tight schedule and loosely defined user requirements that often changed during the development. Experience has shown that the appropriate assignment of Scrum roles, staff training, and strict adherence to the concept of "done" contributed significantly to the success of the project. On the other hand, the project also revealed some deficiencies in Scrum implementation, primarily the lack of release planning and inappropriate changes in team composition, which should deserve more attention in future projects. We hope that the experience described in this paper will help those companies that plan to introduce Scrum into their development process.