News
How Facebook Does Agile
- By David Ramel
- January 14, 2011
Time.com last month featured a video that provides an interesting glimpse of Facebook developers interacting during a daily Scrum meeting.
Shot shortly after a widely publicized profile page redesign, the video shows "engineers, designers and data experts" of the profile team discussing the handling of photos and other concerns during the Scrum.
It also explains how different team members work together to "build things as quickly as possible" and shows co-location of "designers, PMs and marketing people" in one room, along with generous use of whiteboards around the room.
Other hints at Agile-like development at Facebook include this post on the engineering team's page that discusses "small, independent teams" and incremental changes.
But, much like Google, Facebook seems to almost go to great pains to not use the term "Agile" in its official engineering and software development communications.
More (non-Agile) insights into software development at Facebook include this note from the engineering team about how it uses open source software such as PHP, MySQL and Memcache and this one on "The Way Facebook is Made," focusing on release engineering.
Interestingly, after a Facebook outage last month, DZone.com declared "Facebook engineers too Agile for their own good!"
Did you find any insights as to how Facebook developers use Agile methodology? Please comment below or drop us a line at [email protected].
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.