Q3: Can you tell us about what led up to the decision to "go agile" at salesforce.com?
The decision to go agile at salesforce.com grew out of a desire to create shorter more predictable releases. We had gone a year without a major release and wanted to get onto a more predictable release schedule that would deliver value at a consistent rate to our customers. Salesforce.com is a young internet company and an agile methodology was a great fit our culture. A big driver for us was to move away from a process that was predictive and move to an empirical model. We also like to do big things quickly so we decided to go "all in" and change the entire product development team at the same time which was very aggressive. Steve Greene was the Scrum Master of the rollout team and I was the Product Owner. The rollout team was a motivated, volunteer, cross-functional group of people that were aligned on the move to the agile model and principles. The results have been extraordinary and we will be presenting them at the annual Scrum Gathering in Chicago this April.
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