Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises

As a co-founder of a small start-up company that grew to 160 people, survived the internet bubble / burst and ultimately was acquired, I never truly understood why large software companies continuously fail to convert themselves to more agile driven organizations. That is until immediately after our acquisition. For the past year, my team and I have successfully convinced many crucial business owners throughout the organization that agile driven concepts as described by Dean Leffingwell are crucial to delivering better software faster. Unfortunately, even though we have made tremendous progress in several key areas, we have been unsuccessful in truly influencing other organizations throughout the company. The past year has been an extremely frustrating experience in many aspects. Furthermore, no matter how hard I tried to learn and research proven methods, I rarely found extensive material to help us on our journey. For the first time, a book accomplished the missing void we saught so hard to find. Dean's book truly hits the mark and accurately describes why so many companies have such a hard time converting. He provides history behind the agile methodologies in order to provide proper context. The history lesson is informative even for individuals who have a strong background. He completes the book by breaking out agile concepts that scale regardless of size and more importantly, he also covers several concepts that if implemented, help a large company adapt to more agile best practices. My only knock on the book is that I wish he would have spent more time on the one key issue that continues to kill us - the need for organizational change. However, after thinking about this issue for a while, what can an author really do to improve a company's ability to change the organizational structure? Not much I am afraid... This is a fantastic book that everyone should read - even folks that work in small companies. I am confident that the reader will walk away with at least a few good ideas to leverage now or as the company grows. If you already work at a large company, the book will at a minimum give you some peace of mind and hopefully will serve as a vehicle to encourage change by others. Thanks for an outstanding book!

I'm a serial software entrepreneur, working on my 3rd venture funded software company. I've known Dean Leffingwell for nearly five years now, and he introduced agile development to Ping Identity about three years ago. I've never seen software developed so consistently, and with such quality as I've experienced here, under Dean's guidance. We've been receiving the benefits of agile since then. Last year, we had 22 releases across 3 major product lines, and not a one of them was a single day late. We support hundreds of Fortune 1000 enterprises with a single person dedicated to support -- the software is that solid. Dean does a case study of our methods in Chapter 19, "Managing Highly Distributed Development." The agile methods Dean espouses in this book are delivering productivity and quality benefits far in excess of what I have seen teams deliver in my past. The net result is that we deliver software at such a clip that competition can simple not keep pace. Not only is the ROI there, but team morale across the company is higher. Everyone knows that engineering delivers on time, and that in turn has every other department taking their commitments more seriously. I highly recommend this book to any executive (with the exception of my competitors) who seek to increase the productivity, quality, and time to market of their software processes.

As someone who has guided many enterprise organizations in scaling Scrum, this book covers all of the critical roadblocks that are sure to be in your path. Scaling Software Agility is a must read for anyone in a technical or business leadership capacity considering advancing agile beyond a few teams or projects. It combines the organizational influences from Scrum with the development practices of Extreme Programming (XP) and balances it with some of the best practices from the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to provide a scalable agile approach. Dean Leffingwell eases you into scaling agile in a very comfortable way - first through reviewing many of the existing methods, then through showing how many of the common practices you are implementing today actually scale, and finally through recognizing the key differences and approaches required in scaling agile to a large enterprise. His many years experience in agile (and more importantly non-agile) environments come through in the way he walks you through his discovery of this scalable agile approach. Dean also doesn't hold back any punches in his critique of agile practices and what is needed, or needs to be changed, to scale them. He is quite direct in his opposition to XP's emergent architectural approach and its inability to scale - rather he introduces Intentional Architecture. Is it too prescriptive to be agile? If you are an enterprise architecture developing systems of systems, you might not think so. Dean provides some excellent ideas to help balance architectural discovery and planning to keep your runway long and clear. Dean is perhaps best known for his work in Requirements Management. In this book he visits each of the agile, iterative and lean requirements approaches to explain how a balanced, just-in-time approach provides the right mix to scale. I find that this is often the biggest change to most enterprise organizations that tend to write verbose specifications and have the most concerns about project scope and governance. Dean provides a clear picture of how to manage requirements efficiently. While each of the chapters in the later half of this book could fill an entire book itself, Dean does an excellent job in presenting the critical elements of each and just enough to help get you going down the right path. Yet I would have preferred to see more depth in organizational structures which influence agile scalability - an area that I find particularly troublesome for most large companies. However, as Dean said in describing his book, "If this book were any thicker, it wouldn't be agile."

This is my new favorite book! Dean does a great job giving practical and important information to teams of all sizes. You don't have to be in an enterprise size team to learn from Dean's experiences. All of Part II will be helpful to teams. Part III has a lot of information key to your success adopting and adapting agile for bigger teams, but even smaller ones can gain from his insights. I highly recommend this book.

If you're new to the agile process world, you may look at this book with a mixture of apprehension and skepticism. I would not blame you. Agile processes may seem the place of strange expressions--sprint, velocity, scrum (is this a rugby game?), extreme programming (are we jumping off cliffs with a snowboard?), user stories, epics and sagas (is this a writers' workshop?)--and weird social rituals--pair programming, user retrospectives, huddles or daily stand-up meetings (are developers and testers now hugging each other at work?). Agile teams also seem to consume inordinate amounts of colorful sticky notes and 4×6 index cards to cover any walls they can find, and the whole thing appears informal to a fault. We are in Dilbert-land. But make no mistake: agile software development processes are "crossing the chasm," to use the term coined by Jeffrey Moore, and we are today far beyond the funny, geeky jargon and into effective, productive, and scalable development methods. Agile projects are carefully planned, but they are planned differently, and the plan is revised and refined more often. You may also have been told that agile methods have their "sweet spots" around small teams (7 to 12 people), preferably collocated, for short projects (2 to 9 months), making them inapplicable in your own environment of large, long-lived, globally distributed software development endeavors. This too is all changing rapidly as numerous projects around the world are pushing these boundaries, and they are achieving success in higher productivity and higher quality of their software outcomes. Herein lays Dean's major contribution to be discovered in the body of this book. Rising above the debate between the various families of agile processes--XP, Scrum, Lean, DSDM, FDD, Rational Unified Process (RUP) and so on (which are nicely presented), he establishes what is common among them as a baseline before he proceeds to his main objective of showing how to scale these agile approaches beyond their existing sweet spot. He is not introducing a new agile process to add to this already long roster, but rather he extends them all with a set of new practices, practices that live at a higher level, both technical and managerial, and that embrace and integrate existing established agile practices (the ones with the funny names). In addition to synthesizing the best engineering practices that are common among these methods, he also describe methods aiming at the governance of larger agile projects: topics such as release planning; handling large, distributed teams; establishing the business value of the project; and dealing with large, long-lived developments, to mention only a few. The author's work is not academic, he's not merely positing some new bold conjectures for you to try out. His advice is rooted in years of active, hands-on practice in many companies, many projects, in a wide range of industries, from life-sustaining medical equipment to software tools, from amusem