When Is Scrum Right for Your Team? Real-World Lessons from NetEase Youdao

NetEase Youdao Note’s leader discusses practical agile development experience and explains when Scrum is appropriate: the team must have at least three engineers and a suitable Scrum Master.

1. The team has three or more development engineers. 2. The team includes a suitable Scrum Master.

The Youdao cloud‑note team started in 2010, experimenting with Scrum from the beginning. By the end of 2012 they had released 46 versions across five platforms and accumulated nearly ten million active users, developing a Scrum practice suited to medium‑size product‑focused teams.

Scrum is not a cure‑all; it should be introduced when the timing is right. Early on, small teams (one or two engineers) adopt only parts of Scrum, such as sprint cycles and demos, to create pressure and visibility. As the team grows, practices like pair programming, continuous integration, and code reviews are added before fully adopting Scrum.

If a suitable Scrum Master cannot be found, agile adoption should be delayed. The Scrum Master should endorse agile, understand the business, act as a coach, guide decisions, help resolve difficulties, and prioritize important work.

In Youdao’s experience, the most effective Scrum Master is often a technical lead rather than a product manager, because product managers already carry heavy product responsibilities.

Limit Scrum team size and establish inter‑team collaboration mechanisms. When a team becomes too large, efficiency drops. Youdao split its mobile team into separate Android and iOS Scrum teams, keeping each meeting under nine participants. Cross‑team coordination is handled through regular Scrum Master meetings, where dependencies are discussed and a designated Scrum Master drives collaboration.

Product managers and engineers must embrace Scrum‑driven change. Agile shifts release cycles to sprint‑based, continuous delivery, with product managers defining priority and the whole team deciding sprint scope. Engineers adopt emergent design, incremental refactoring, and avoid over‑design.

Quantify team execution with metrics. Youdao defines completion rate, estimation accuracy, and plan rationality. Completion rate = 1 – (remaining time of unfinished tasks / estimated time of planned tasks), with 80‑90% considered healthy.

Efficient sprint planning requires pre‑refining requirements, appropriate task granularity (0.5‑3 days), random task claiming, research tasks, and accurate estimation. Youdao experimented with both module‑owner and random task assignment, eventually moving to random claiming to improve flexibility.

Streamline development and testing. Testing follows each development sprint, while bugs from the previous sprint are fixed during the next sprint, using historical data for accurate time estimation.

Release cycles follow sprint intervals. Versions are packaged after one or more sprints, without disrupting the sprint cadence.

Support Scrum with engineering practices. Mandatory unit tests, code reviews, pair programming, and continuous integration are enforced. Continuous integration runs nightly, deploying builds to test servers and internal devices.

Glossary:

Agile Development: An iterative approach that breaks large releases into small, frequent increments.

Scrum: A project‑management framework for agile development, involving Scrum teams, a Scrum Master, and sprint cycles.

Sprint: A time‑boxed iteration within Scrum where a set of tasks is completed.