Scaling Software 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.







Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

About the Author 

Part I: Overview of Software Agility

Chapter 1: Introduction to Agile Methods

Chapter 2: Why the Waterfall Model Doesn’t Work

Chapter 3: The Essence of XP

Chapter 4: The Essence of Scrum

Chapter 5: The Essence of RUP

Chapter 6: Lean Software, DSDM, and FDD

Chapter 7: The Essence of Agile

Chapter 8: The Challenge of Scaling Agile

Part II: Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale

Chapter 9: The Define/Build/Test Component Team

Chapter 10: Two Levels of Planning and Tracking

Chapter 11: Mastering the Iteration

Chapter 12: Smaller, More Frequent Releases

Chapter 13: Concurrent Testing

Chapter 14: Continuous Integration

Chapter 15: Regular Reflection and Adaptation

Part III: Creating the Agile Enterprise

Chapter 16: Intentional Architecture

Chapter 17: Lean Requirements at Scale: Vision, Roadmap, and Just-in-Time Elaboration

Chapter 18: Systems of Systems and the Agile Release Train

Chapter 19: Managing Highly Distributed Development

Chapter 20: Impact on Customers and Operations

Chapter 21: Changing the Organization

Chapter 22: Measuring Business Performance

Conclusion: Agility Works at Scale

Bibliography

Index