While attending the “Agile in Turbulent Times” webinar from Rally Software yesterday, I learned how HomeAway successfully implemented Agile into an international development team. I captured the lessons they learned, and want to share them with you all. First, some background.

HomeAway uses 1 or 2 week iterations, depending on the team (they have multiple teams in 5 countries), and they do major releases every two weeks, with minor releases in between. They were looking at agile because of:

• Little to no visibility for executives and business owners on the development process
• Lack of a consistent development methodology
• Difficulty tracking costs back to projects
• Quality was starting to suffer

The mistakes they made when first implementing agile are ones I have heard from many companies. Here are their suggestions to avoiding making the same ones:

• Start small. Don’t make a sweeping overhaul.
• Bring in-house people up to speed, and then spread it. Don’t proceed without developing in-house expertise.
• Use the community. There are a lot of people out there implementing agile. Find out what is and isn’t working for them. Don’t go it alone.
• Socialize the change. Don’t evangelize.

Of course it isn’t all mistakes. They did a lot right:

• Sent five team members to CSM (Certified ScrumMaster) training
• Brought in a coach
• Began socializing one team

Here’s their advice:

• Bring teams online as a whole
• Don’t seed the organization with the single team (i.e. don’t break up the initial team)
• Spread adoption
• Send an ambassador to the local development community
• Use a software tool so that “the business” can get a single view into what’s going on

I hope that their lessons help you implement agile in your company.

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