Is change a good thing in the Agile/Scrum world?
Benefield: I think it’s very human to change our minds. As soon as you start building a product and you get to see it, you want to start making changes. Instead of saying, “You can’t change it,” we really embrace [change]. In the Internet space, you have to be able to change really quickly. An example is that we were building the backend of mass storage for Yahoo Mail. Partway through, a competitor offered a huge amount of storage for mail. So we had to react incredibly quickly, and if we had been doing traditional waterfall, there’s no way we could have [done it], and we were able to compete and meet that competitive threat very quickly. We’ve seen that [happen] time and time again with products. Traditionally, companies do change management, and they add all of these change requests, which is the way that companies make money. It looks like they are on time and budget, but the projects can take twice as long because of all of these change requests that get added on. It’s like putting
