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Large-Scale Agile Development - Nov 2006
 Fact: Agile
processes are appropriate for large-scale and business critical projects.
Certainly software vendors, the most mature users of Agile processes, see Agile
development as the key to increase revenue and quality of their very products.
Why, then, are IT organizations skeptical? In this issue of the Agile Journal,
we look at a range of techniques and best practices that companies have used on
large Agile projects.
Ross Pettit
explores what companies can do to leverage skills and experience, monitor
practice adoption, align staff recruiting, and measure results. Linsley Meadows
and Sean Hanly share how British Telecom is transforming an organization of
14,000 developers by investing in strong Agile mentors and coaches. And Kirk
Knoernschild argues that Agile processes can provide a set of checks and
balances to large teams, so that development teams can minimize dependencies
among their development artifacts and emphasize integration earlier in the
software lifecycle.
From an
architectural perspective, Scott Ambler looks at the balance between effective
up front architectural design and the need for just-in-time refinement and
implementation. Israel Gat and Ryan Martens show how BMC Software has not only
scaled its use of Agile processes for large teams, but how it is running
product development teams across six locations and 11 time zones. And finally,
we are fortunate to have just received Alistair Cockburn's second edition of
the "Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game." Cockburn provides a set
of core principles that are key to the success of Agile projects, and takes a
particular look at how teams can truly become self-adapting.
This is an exciting time in the history of Agile
development. We know that 2007 will bring even more successful large-scale
projects and best practices on which Agile newcomers can draw. Please send us
your best practices and suggestions for future articles. If you would like to
contribute an article on this or another upcoming topic, go to the "Letters to
the Editor" in the
forum at AgileJournal.com.
Liz
Barnett
Editor in Chief
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Why Use Agile Processes Outside of IT?
Instead of asking "why," companies are asking "why not?" use Agile approaches outside of the software development organization. In this time of hyper-changing businesses and global competition, pragmatism is essential. Many Agile practices lend themselves to solving challenging problems, regardless of the context. This is not to say that Agile processes are the next silver bullet; we know that this will never be true. But it is encouraging to see how and where Agile practices are being adopted in organizations that have nothing to do with software development.
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Stories of Agile Work
These days, most people associate the word "agile" with "software development." However, people are applying the basic ideas of agile methods outside this type of work. Here are three stories of agile methods used in situations that are not in the context of software development. They illustrate how agile methods can be stretched to serve well in other contexts. From these and other examples, we have come to understand that agile methods consist of seven core practices, regardless of the problem domain: self-organizing team, deliver frequently, plan to learn, communicate powerfully, quality is not negotiable, measure value, and clear the path.
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Agile Lessons From "I Love Lucy"
An old "I Love Lucy" episode shows Lucy and Ethel working at a candy factory. Their job is to take pieces of candy off a conveyer belt and put them in packages. At first everything goes well. Lucy and Ethel have this candy packaging thing down pat. Alas, things start to change. The conveyer belt sends out candy faster and faster. At first Lucy and Ethel try to cope. They try to work faster. Then their work gets sloppy. Finally, rather than packaging the candy at all, they resort to throwing it away, or even eating it. A quick leap of the imagination would show retailers struggling to get the additional candy packages on the shelf, customers refusing to eat more candy just because there happens to be more available, and the factory management struggling to get their supply chain responsive to the faster manufacturing process.
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 | Eye on the Prize: Best Practices for Aligning Agile Efforts with Business Goals
A phrase heard often in Agile discussions is "let the product lead." Applied correctly, these four words powerfully focus an Agile team's energy directly on work that provides the highest business value. Traditional engineering practices that focus on process often divert a technology team's energy away from quick delivery of business value, and toward design of infrastructure and architecture. Deep focus on technology decisions breaks the line-of-sight with busine...
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 | A Disciplined Approach to Adopting Agile Practices: The Agile Adoption Framework, Part 2
A number of years ago we predicted that by 2007 or 2008 agile adoption would be on the rise and that the agile community would be in need for a structured approach to help it with its agile adoption efforts. As a result, we invested time, effort, and money to develop an efficient and effective approach to guide and assist those who want to adopt agile practices. Last month we started to see our prediction become a reality when the tentative program for the Agile 2007 conference was posted online...
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 | The Agile Organization
When successfully adopted, Agile practices create hyper-efficient application development teams capable of regular, and even aggressive, delivery of business value. While an exciting prospect for developers, there will not be much business impact if the rest of the IT organization, and indeed the business itself, can't make use of this new-found efficiency. Staffing and resource decisions need to be made efficiently, requirements captured quickly, testing and production environments in...
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 | Global Agile Development: How Investing in the Right Team Impacts Long-Term Rewards
Many software development organizations are electing to implement Agile development methodologies in order to take advantage of the cost, quality, and time-to-market benefits commonly achieved with this approach. At the same time, these organizations are moving software development offshore to take advantage of greater scalability and "round the clock" development cycles. However, in combining these two efforts, the highly collaborative nature of Agile is tested as teams are faced wi...
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 | CASE STUDY: Using Agile Software Development at the Educational Credit Management Corporation
This paper outlines an adaptation of Agile development based on a pilot project at the Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC), a mid-sized non-profit corporation in the student loan guarantor industry. To support the re-engineering of mission-critical loan management applications, ECMC needed to modify Agile development methods to incorporate up-front project estimates to gain funding approval. IT also needed to redefine the traditional working relationship with its busines...
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 | FEATURED BOOK: Lean Software Strategies: Proven Techniques for Managers and Developers
by Peter Middleton and James Sutton
Lean Software Strategies seems to be one of the first books specifically about applying Lean principles and techniques to software development that is not written by the Poppendiecks. When the book first came out, I admit I was put off by several unfavorable reviews at Amazon.com. When I later learned it won the 2007 Shingo prize for excellence in manufacturing research, and saw Lisa Crispin's review at StickyMinds, I decided to give it a second look. I...
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 | Checks And Balances
Agile software development is no less formal than the predictive and contract-driven ceremonial processes used on many enterprise development efforts today. However, large enterprise development efforts have been weary of adopting agile development practices. Skeptics fear that an agile approach is nothing more than an excuse for developers to avoid documentation, while requiring heroic efforts on the part of a few developers who hack together a compromised solution without clear guidance, contr...
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 | Scaling Agile Development Via Architecture
Every system has an architecture, even systems developed using agile methodologies. Whether you attempt to define that architecture up front in detail or whether it emerges over time is up to you. My experience is that most agile teams follow a strategy somewhere between these two extremes, one that involves investing a bit of time up front to think through the "big issues" but which addresses the details on a just-in-time (JIT) basis. That strategy, combined with proving your architectural idea...
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 | FEATURED BOOK: Agile Software Development, The Cooperative Game by Alistair Cockburn
I have always found Alistair Cockburn's Crystal family of agile methodologies to be among the most pragmatic approaches to software development. [1] Cockburn advocates that teams should adopt a specific instance of a methodology based on risk and scale factors for their projects. In the second edition to his book, Agile Software Development (with new subtitle "The Cooperative Game"), Cockburn updates his ideas on software development, with particular emphasis on "the cooperative game of inve...
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 | CASE STUDY: How BMC Is Scaling Agile Development
Sure, Agile development works well for small teams. But what happens when you apply Agile practices to a program that involves 300-plus developers and testers spread from India to Houston to Israel? In less than one year, with the help of coaching services and Agile lifecycle management tools, BMC Software's Distributed Systems Management (DSM) group transformed its development organization. BMC used Agile development practices to deliver a major product to the market in less time and ...
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Latest Issues of Agile Journal
Coming Up - Editorial Calendar
- August 13 - Quality Agile Development
- September 10 - Agile News
- October 08 - Valuable Agile Practices
- November 12 - Introducing Agile to the Organization
- December 10 - The State of the Agile Community
See the full 2008 Editorial Calendar >
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