Criteo Agile Practitioners to improve teams’ health and efficiency

Beginning of Agility in Criteo

We started using post-its and doing some stand-up meetings in 2010. But it’s only in 2013 that we really started using the Scrum ceremonies and sprints with an R&D pilot team including dedicated Scrum Master and Product Owner.
Since then, more and more R&D teams have used Agile methodologies, whatever it’s Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban or only a subset of the ceremonies.

Each R&D team is agile its way

Each R&D team decides of its methodologies, and is actually taking what is best to improve its own efficiency, always based on the principles of the Agile manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

So why did we create CAP?

Some of us wanted not only to find answers to continuously improve our efficiency, but also to share best practices, so we decided to create the Criteo Agile Practitioners group and hold bi-weekly CAP meetings since 2015.

What do we do?

Promote and facilitate retrospectives (such as regular Team Health Check meetings) to continuously improve our R&D. That helped push some actions such as

• Teams methodologies improvements,
• Optimizing our testing tools,
• Improve our test environments for all projects.

Promote Team Health On the Toilets posters (guess where? hint…) and hold Return On Experience sessions to share best practices as on

• Scrum ceremonies (Stand-ups, Retrospectives, etc.),
• Test Driven Development,
• Efficiency with Slack bots,
• Reducing our technical debt,
• Working across multiple sites, etc.

We could do nothing and let ourselves become yet another big and slow company by

• NOT evolving our products and systems quick enough to stay leader in the market
• NOT sharing more good practices and tools
• NOT tackling common pain points across our departments
• NOT improving code quality before it gets live with a trail of support tickets

But of course, we won’t do that! We are actually meeting regularly around a lunch to discuss concerns and share best practices!

We will share some of them in some upcoming blog posts: stay tuned!

The Criteo engineering team is growing.Take a look at our job postings.

Posted by :

Muleine Lim
Senior Staff EPM