There are so many using agile methodology indeed for now, and for those very big companies, they do it in Agile together with their own ideas, and what’s more, is that developing a management platform online or offline.

What I would like to introduce is that our own company is using it as the methodology, and do practices based on Scrum. And what’s funnier is that our main product ZenTao - An Application Lifecycle Management tool which we use ourselves to do collaborations.

First of all, I need to introduce our team. We are a software developing company locates in Qingdao, China and there are about 70 employees for now. It’s not a small team indeed, but we implement agile quite handy.

We did restructure our organization based on Ameba which was very first proposed by INAMORI KAZUO from KYOCERA about 6 years ago. Ameba focuses more on organization structure in an Agile way and now it has been very popular in China and Japan for the past decades. Because of Ameba, Each Ameba(a team) in our company forms of mostly 4 or 5 members so that we can keep running fast and lightly. Obviously, we are an agile team.

In each Ameba(or a team), we manage our own product in ZenTao, we list the products or projects we are being involved in. An Ameba leader, you could take him as a Scrum Master, who will list all the stories of this product or project, which you could take it as a Product backlog, and there will be sprint planning, Ameba leader will create a plan with some stories of this product and create a corresponded sprint, it will last about one or two weeks. And after that, the team will communicate together and turn stories into tasks and they all get tasks which they should complete in this sprint.


We do a daily standup meeting and update our tasks and burndown chart every single day to make sure this sprint goes smoothly under control.


And what’s more for dev teams is that you could create a build for this sprint, and link all the finished stories and resolved bugs, and submit it to testers to do testing.


If a sprint has been finished completely, we could go to Product and create a release for this product in ZenTao. And that’s all of what should be done in a sprint.

Agile really teaches us a lot for our team collaboration, it’s more a methodology, you have to implement with practices, maybe Kanban, or scrum, and use management tool is optional but it does really matter when it comes to online collaboration.