Agile Approaches On Large Projects In Large Organizations

Creativity and productivity, rapid adaptation to change, value for the customer -- these are just some of the advantages of implementing agile methods in project work. However, agile methods have been most widely and successfully undertaken in the context of small, collocated teams working on small software projects, known as the "agile sweet spot." In this monograph, Brian Hobbs and Yvan Petit explore the use and impact of agile outside of the agile sweet spot. Through a case study and survey questionnaire, they uncover research questions that have remained largely unexamined in the literature, on the project level as well as on the organizational level, namely: 1.) What challenges are encountered when applying agile approaches to large, multi-team software projects and what practices have been developed to alleviate these challenges? 2.) How does the context of large, complex organizations affect the adaptation and adoption of agile approaches and vice versa? An illuminating study of this emerging field, Agile Methods on Large Projects in Large Organizations opens the door to further investigation on the future role of project managers, the use of scaling frameworks at the program and portfolio levels, and the effects of DevOps, one of the recent trends in agile software development.

Creativity and productivity, rapid adaptation to change, value for the customer—these are just some of the advantages of implementing agile practices in project work. However, agile practices have been most widely and successfully undertaken in the context of small, colocated teams working on small software projects, known as the "agile sweet spot." In this monograph, Brian Hobbs and Yvan Petit explore the use and impact of agile outside of the agile sweet spot. Through a case study and survey questionnaire, they uncover research questions that have remained largely unexamined in the literature, on the project level as well as on the organizational level, namely: •What challenges are encountered when applying agile approaches to large, multi-team software projects and what practices have been developed to alleviate these challenges? •How does the context of large, complex organizations affect the adaptation and adoption of agile approaches and vice versa? An illuminating study of this emerging field, Agile Approaches on Large Projects in Large Organizations opens the door to further investigation on the future role of project managers, the use of scaling frameworks at the program and portfolio levels, and the effects of DevOps, one of the recent trends in agile software development.

The Go-To Resource for Large-Scale Organizations to Be Agile Rather than asking, “How can we do agile at scale in our big complex organization?” a different and deeper question is, “How can we have the same simple structure that Scrum offers for the organization, and be agile at scale rather than do agile?” This profound insight is at the heart of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum). In Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde have distilled over a decade of experience in large-scale LeSS adoptions towards a simpler organization that delivers more flexibility with less complexity, more value with less waste, and more purpose with less prescription. Targeted to anyone involved in large-scale development, Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, offers straight-to-the-point guides for how to be agile at scale, with LeSS. It will clearly guide you to Adopt LeSS Structure a large development organization for customer value Clarify the role of management and Scrum Master Define what your product is, and why Be a great Product Owner Work with multiple whole-product focused feature teams in one Sprint that produces a shippable product Coordinate and integrate between teams Work with multi-site teams

Today, even the largest development organizations are turning to agile methodologies, seeking major productivity and quality improvements. However, large-scale agile development is difficult, and publicly available case studies have been scarce. Now, three agile pioneers at Hewlett-Packard present a candid, start-to-finish insider’s look at how they’ve succeeded with agile in one of the company’s most mission-critical software environments: firmware for HP LaserJet printers. This book tells the story of an extraordinary experiment and journey. Could agile principles be applied to re-architect an enormous legacy code base? Could agile enable both timely delivery and ongoing innovation? Could it really be applied to 400+ developers distributed across four states, three continents, and four business units? Could it go beyond delivering incremental gains, to meet the stretch goal of 10x developer productivity improvements? It could, and it did—but getting there was not easy. Writing for both managers and technologists, the authors candidly discuss both their successes and failures, presenting actionable lessons for other development organizations, as well as approaches that have proven themselves repeatedly in HP’s challenging environment. They not only illuminate the potential benefits of agile in large-scale development, they also systematically show how these benefits can actually be achieved. Coverage includes: • Tightly linking agile methods and enterprise architecture with business objectives • Focusing agile practices on your worst development pain points to get the most bang for your buck • Abandoning classic agile methods that don’t work at the largest scale • Employing agile methods to establish a new architecture • Using metrics as a “conversation starter” around agile process improvements • Leveraging continuous integration and quality systems to reduce costs, accelerate schedules, and automate the delivery pipeline • Taming the planning beast with “light-touch” agile planning and lightweight long-range forecasting • Implementing effective project management and ensuring accountability in large agile projects • Managing tradeoffs associated with key decisions about organizational structure • Overcoming U.S./India cultural differences that can complicate offshore development • Selecting tools to support quantum leaps in productivity in your organization • Using change management disciplines to support greater enterprise agility

“Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the ‘stigma’ of ‘agile only works for small projects’ continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell’s book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell’s book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development.” —Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management “There’s tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell’s observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he’s been there, done that, and has seen what’s worked.” —Grady Booch, IBM Fellow Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development. Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods. Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level. Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale. This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.

Software Development is moving towards a more agile and more flexible approach. It turns out that the traditional "waterfall" model is not supportive in an environment where technical, financial and strategic constraints are changing almost every day. But what is agility? What are today’s major approaches? And especially: What is the impact of agile development principles on the development teams, on project management and on software architects? How can large enterprises become more agile and improve their business processes, which have been existing since many, many years? What are the limitations of Agility? And what is the right balance between reliable structures and flexibility? This book will give answers to these questions. A strong emphasis will be on real life project examples, which describe how development teams have moved from a waterfall model towards an Agile Software Development approach.

Use Kanban to maximize efficiency, predictability, quality, and value With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban. Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team. Think of this book as “Kanban in a box”: open it, read the quickstart guide, and you’re up and running fast. As you gain experience, Brechner reveals powerful techniques for right-sizing teams, estimating, meeting deadlines, deploying components and services, adapting or evolving from Scrum or traditional Waterfall, and more. For every step of your journey, you’ll find pragmatic advice, useful checklists, and actionable lessons. This truly is “Kanban in a box”: all you need to deliver breakthrough value and quality. Use Kanban techniques to: Start delivering continuous value with your current team and project Master five quick steps for completing work backlogs Plan and staff new projects more effectively Minimize work in progress and quickly adjust to change Eliminate artificial meetings and prolonged stabilization Improve and enhance customer engagement Visualize workflow and fix revealed bottlenecks Drive quality upstream Integrate Kanban into large projects Optimize sustained engineering (contributed by James Waletzky) Expand Kanban beyond software development

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2018, held in Porto, Portugal, in May 2018.XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice, and XP 2018 provided a playful and informal environment to learn and trigger discussions around its main theme - make, inspect, adapt.The 21 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: agile requirements; agile testing; agile transformation; scaling agile; human-centric agile; and continuous experimentation. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.