Published: 15 Dec 2011
At salesforce.com, agile has paid big dividends in helping us regain some of the core values we’d lost sight of as we grew. One of the biggest of these values: getting our release schedule back on track. Salesforce.com was founded in a San Francisco apartment in 1999. Back then, setting and meeting deadlines was comparatively easy because our entire R&D organization was so small it could fit around a dinner table. But as we grew and the complexity of our cloud-based products increased, dates for major releases began to slip. By 2006, the last of the company’s “pre-agile” days, salesforce.com had gone from four seasonal releases per year down to just one, which goes against the very grain of cloud computing. That release, which took about 15 months to complete, was a key indicator that the company needed to make a radical change in its development methodology.
Since our move to agile, each successive major release has been deployed on the exact day it was scheduled. Salesforce.com is back in a regular delivery rhythm, and R&D feels confident new releases will continue to be delivered on time. The related metrics are also strong. Time to market of major releases has increased by 61 percent. Salesforce.com’s Net Promoter Score, a good indicator of customer satisfaction, is at 94 percent.
