Christophe Louvion joined online ad network Gorilla Nation last January from comparison-shopping Web site Shopzilla.com (formerly BizRate.com), where he was vice president of engineering. The 35-year-old native of France is a devotee of lean/agile product development and is a certified agile coach and ScrumMaster. (Scrum is an agile process characterized by self-directed teams, and projects broken into small chunks.) Louvion is in the process of becoming a certified Scrum coach — the black belt of Scrum — of which there are only a handful worldwide today, he says.
What’s the difference between agile and Scrum? It’s like the difference between medicine and brain surgery. Scrum is just one way to implement agile, with a few of its own particular rules. One is that everyone is either the owner of the product to be built, the team delivering it or the ScrumMaster overseeing the two groups. Another is to deliver a new, working version of software at least every 30 days, preferably every two weeks.
Agile programming does not necessarily require such iterations. Agile is really about looking for ways to respond to change quickly.
How are you implementing agile and Scrum principles at Gorilla Nation? When I came to Gorilla Nation, I had to coach a lot of middle to upper managers on changes I wanted to make. For instance, I removed boundaries between departments — not just engineers and QA, but also non-IT areas such as HR, business development and operations.
Most companies are organized around functions, even though it’s usually dysfunctional. I like to organize teams vertically by product and value streams. It’s still a matrix. The engineers in business development and QA still report to their functional heads.
Dossier
Christophe Louvion
Name: Christophe Louvion
Title: Chief product/technology officer
Organization: Gorilla Nation Media LLC
Location: Los Angeles
First job: Software engineer at BizRate.com 10 years ago
Favorite book: Implementing Lean Software Development, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
Passions outside of work: Kite surfing, and fine food and wines
Favorite consumer technology: The iPhone
Favorite programming tools: Sharpies and Post-it notes
We are launching a new online video advertising product called Springboard. We put on our agile hat and decided we would launch in just two months. We built this whole platform with two teams of 11 developers total.
Every day, each team pushed code into a central area. If any team slowed down, I moved resources over there. There’s no shame if a team falls behind. If one team has issues, I help resolve them rather than blame them.
Has agile become so mainstream that it’s become a trendy, meaningless buzzword? The term agile is being used by [some] people to justify poor programming practices such as cowboy coding.
“We don’t have to write documentation; we’re doing agile,” they’ll say. Like with everything else, people are bending the rules to accommodate their personal preferences.
Can middle managers be an obstacle to agile? Most middle managers are like puppet masters, telling people what to do. We really need to change our expectations around middle managers, not have them dictate and be task-givers, but be impediment-removers.
If a company has switched to agile programming and they haven’t quadrupled their developer productivity in six months, they aren’t doing it right. After two years, they should be five to 10 times more productive than before.
Why do you say Sharpie markers and Post-it notes are your favorite developer tools? In general, tools are dangerous for teams new to Scrum. To teach math to a 10-year-old, you give him a piece of paper, not a calculator. I recommend a Sharpie marker, whiteboard and Post-it notes. For larger or distributed teams, I do recommend wikis or Scrum tools such as RallyDev.com.
Is it easier for certain types of companies — say, a Web firm like Google — to do agile? I think it has less to do with what industry you’re in [than] whether your leader is willing to make the changes.
With Google, I think they have put a structure in place that attracts the best talent. Many of the things they released have been the result of employees’ “20% time.” I think it fits with the agile manifesto. If you give developers free time, you’ll get a return back.
How about Microsoft? A lot of people say that it’s obviously not agile. At any agile conference, you’ll see a lot of Microsoft badges. There are plenty of teams at Redmond doing agile. The bigger the boat, the longer it takes to change course. The problem, unlike with Google, is that the agile culture doesn’t seem to come from the top.
Does age or personality affect your ability to be an agile programmer of the highest level? I don’t think age has much to do with it. The principles of agile came from lean manufacturing, which started in the 1960s. There are people who have been evangelizing lean since then who are nearly twice my age.
I think culture and education make a difference. I think Europeans have an easier time adopting agile than Americans. The European education system focuses more on teaching the scientific method to solve problems. Engineers here do apply that to technical problems, but they don’t generally apply it to organizational problems.
But do you favor certain types of programmers anyway? I’m actually more interested in their soft skills, which are harder to teach than things like computer languages. So I look at how they manage conflicts and share information, whether they have honesty and integrity, how they say no and set expectations. Most engineers say yes to all of the requests they get. As a result, they end up doing a bad job with all of them.
But ensuring that the team can be productive is more important than who I hire. There is a good quote from the chairman of Toyota. Someone asked him, “What is Toyota’s advantage?” He replied, “It is our ability to get normal people to do outstanding things. Other companies try to hire outstanding people to do normal things.”
