Innovations by Yoast: Agile processes

Our (then) CTO Omar introduced Kanban not long after joining the company. This methodology is based on the pull-principle: whenever you have room to do work, you pick up the first thing that needs attention. This worked out great for all the development teams. Every team has made their own little tweaks to alter this methodology to fit their needs.

Those little tweaks are a very important part of how we approach the processes of the teams. They provide the freedom and flexibility to find optimizations in the implementation. Saving time, avoiding confusion and improving communication are the measurements we use to determine if something is an improvement. We’ve had a number of occasions where one of the teams introduced a new principle to their process, which was picked up by the other teams quickly and became a standard.

At the beginning of 2019, the first team started using Scrum to gain a better insight into delivery expectations and clarity of the tasks that need to be done. Soon, the other development teams followed suit. Scrum is proving to be a valuable tool to set up a “Product & QA → UX → Development” prioritization and planning structure in our company.