Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises

The Agile Software Development Series

by Dean Leffingwell

“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 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 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.

Genres: Management, Technology, Nonfiction, Business, Software, Technical, Reference

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

2 chapters of value, the rest filler.

[Michael Fruergaard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of good thinking, but too high level. Half the book is a repeat of small-size scrum. I didn't get the needed tools to scale agile from reading this book.

[Jack Repenning · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great overview book, if what you're looking for is an overview of half a dozen trendy new development processes. This one won't make you competent to actually *do* any of them, but it should make you able to contribute to a discussion about choosing one.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fast paced read on how Agile can be adapted to organisations with more than one team of 4-8 people (which is pretty much anyone).

Part 1 covers different types of Agile methodoligies (XP, Scrum, RUP, FDD, Lean, ...) and attempts to find some common ground amongst all of them (such as timeboxing, frequent delivery of value, etc.) while also pointing out differences between them (such as RUP and DSDM having more design, while XP prefers everything to grow organically). This section is definitely worth a read before blindly diving into Scrum

Part 2 expands on the common Agile practices identified in Part 1. There are references to particular Agile methodoligies (mostly XP, RUP and Scrum), but the ideas are general and useful to any larger company.

Part 3 specifically looks at challenges that appear in the enterprise (hundreds of developers, non-colocated teams, other organisational changes, etc.) and provides some interesting suggestions on how to overcome these problems. There are no silver bullets here, but the actual solution will change from organisation to another.

The only negative here would be weak coverage of RUP. It is quite a complicated process that cannot really be explained in only a handful of pages; don't bother reading this if you are hoping to see if RUP can be the large enterprise Agile solution (answer: yes, IBM will sell it to you).

[Kim Leandersson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok, if you are new to agile than i would say this is a very good book (4 stars). It gives a good overview of scrum and other methods in an easy to understand and very pedagogical writing. The parts covering RUP and how this could be used in an agile way was quite interesting.

However, the title talks about scaling and large enterprise so my expectation was not an agile introduction but i was expecting a book focusing on scaling (sure, introduction is ok, but in this case 2/3 of the book is introduction).

The scaling parts are ok, but on a very high level. There are some challenges described (like architecture, co-location etc) but i feel it miss a lot when it comes to solutions. Sure, there is not one true way to mitigate the challenges, but these areas is where i expected more focus.

In summary, an OK book, but if you already have experience in agile you will not learn a lot more.

[Peter De Kinder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having been on my TO-READ list since the middle of 2016, with this book Dean Leffingwell presents his perspective on Agile methodologies, and how they could be adapted to fit for larger teams and projects. The key thought to take away from this book is Scalability: Agile development can be used for large projects as well as small ones. The book talks about the predecessors of this methodology as well as what makes methodologies like SAFe tick, and how it goes about the Software Delivery Life Cycle (SLDC) to guarantee a successful delivery of the needed software solution.

Complete review: http://evolute.be/reviews/safebook.html

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

More about what agile is than explanations of how to scale it. Metrics/value content are especially outdated. The beginning was a little history behind agile (including XP and RUP).

[Andrew Doran · Rating 4 out of 5]

I���ve had this sitting on my bookshelf since 2008 after Dean Leffingwell came to speak at my firm and now wish that I had read it sooner. (Thanks to my ScanSnap, iPad and Readmill I finally got around to it!) Offers both a solid introduction to agile as well as recognising the inherent problems of applying the techniques across many teams in a large organisation. Has given me lots to think about.

[Edward Sargisson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed. This is largely a basic level book for small teams which spends much of its time contrasting and comparing Scrum, XP and RUP. The material on scaling teams out recommends component teams uncritically without examining feature teams. There was very little material here which was different to other books on the market.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As others have mentioned, this is a good introductory overview of a number of Agile methods.

However, it goes beyond this for readers working in large, complex organisations/systems and introduces how these well known methods might need to be adapted to get the best of them in a scaled environment.

Probably good for Programme Managers who have been handed their first Agile delivery.

[Karl Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of all of the main agile methodologies with practical advice about how to take agile to scale in the enterprise. Dean does a nice job of highlighting the best practices, along with the pitfalls, with good advice on how to work around them. Highly recommend for anyone moving or planning to move their enterprise to Agile!

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really great book on how to create enterprise level software.

There are a number of great things this book recommends to do, but I'm hoping to focus on a few of them over the next few months.

[Henrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on agile software development.

[Chad Holdorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great booking for planning an agile rollout of any scale.

[Christophe Addinquy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ma note de lecture complète en français ici

[VENKATRAMAN C K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview but weak on Architecture and Design aspects of Agile.

[Delhi Irc]

Location: GG7 IRC
Accession No: DL030695