Scaling Lean & Agile Development Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum

by Larman, Craig; Vodde, Bas

• ISBN13: 9780321480965
• ISBN10: 0321480961
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-08
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

Lean Development and Agile Methods for Large-Scale Products: Key Thinking and Organizational Tools for Sustainable Competitive Success Increasingly, large product-development organizations are turning to lean thinking, agile principles and practices, and large-scale Scrum to sustainably and quickly deliver value and innovation. However, many groups have floundered in theirpractice-orientedadoptions. Why? Because without a deeper understanding of thethinking toolsand profoundorganizational redesignneeded, it is as though casting seeds on to an infertile field. Now, drawing on their long experience leading and guiding large-scale lean and agile adoptions for large, multisite, and offshore product development, and drawing on the best research for great team-based agile organizations, internationally recognized consultant and best-selling author Craig Larman and former leader of the agile transformation at Nokia Networks Bas Vodde share the key thinking and organizational tools needed to plant the seeds of product development success in a fertile lean and agile enterprise. Coverage includes Lean thinking and development combined with agile practices and methods Systems thinking Queuing theory and large-scale development processes Moving from single-function and component teams to stable cross-functional cross-component Scrum feature teams with end-to-end responsibility for features Organizational redesign to a lean and agile enterprise that delivers value fast Large-scale Scrum for multi-hundred-person product groups In a competitive environment that demands ever-faster cycle times and greater innovation, applied lean thinking and agile principles are becoming an urgent priority.Scaling Lean & Agile Developmentwill help leaders create the foundation for their lean enterpriseand deliver on the significant benefits of agility. In addition to thefoundationtools in this text, see the companion bookPractices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrumfor complementaryactiontools.

Author Biography

Craig Larman is a management and product development consultant in enterprise-level adoption and use of lean development, agile principles and practices, and large-scale Scrum in large, multisite, and offshore development. He is chief scientist at Valtech, an international consulting and offshore outsourcing company. His books include the best-sellers Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide (Addison-Wesley, 2004) and Applying UML and Patterns, Third Edition (Prentice Hall, 2005).

 

Bas Vodde works as an independent product-development consultant and large-scale Scrum coach. For several years he led the agile and Scrum enterprise-wide adoption initiative at Nokia Networks. He is passionate about improving product development, an avid student of organizational, team management, and product development research, and remains an active developer.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction	p. 1
Thinking Tools
Systems Thinking	p. 9
Lean Thinking	p. 39
Queueing Theory	p. 93
False Dichotomies	p. 125
BeAgile	p. 139
Organizational Tools
Feature Teams	p. 149
Teams	p. 193
Requirement Areas	p. 217
Organization	p. 229
Large-Scale Scrum	p. 289
Miscellany
Scrum Primer	p. 305
Recommended Readings	p. 327
Bibliography	p. 333
Index	p. 343
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

untitled INTRODUCTION The future ain't what it used to be. Yogi BerraWe sat down in the meeting room with our hot coffee. Outside was a bitter-cold north European winter morning. In came our new client and we shook hands. "Thanks for visiting," he said. "First, you should know that our product group is not large, maybe only eighty developers."We once met a group adopting agile development that was not sure if they could grow to very large-scale development: 12 people.People have different scales in mind regarding 'large.' To some it means only 50 people or even less. To others, much more. We define a large product 1 group as one whose members' names you could not remember if you were all together in a room . We work typically with single-product groups in the range of 100500 people that are adopting Scrum, lean principles, and agile development practices, usually on software-intensive embedded systems. So by this definitionat least with our limited memoriesthis is the realm of 'large.'On to our key recommendation : After working for some years in the domains of large , multisite , and offshore development, we have distilled our experience and advice down to the following: Don't do it .There are better ways to build large systems than with many developers in many places. Rather, build a small group of great developers and other talents that can work together in teams, pay them well, and keep them together in one place with product management or whoever acts as the voice of the customer.But of course you are still going to do large, multisite, or offshore development. This is because your existing system is already structured that way, or becausein the case of large groupsthere is the mindset that "big systems need lots of people." We regularly coach groups that ask, "How can we calculate how many people we will need?" Our suggestion is, "Start with a small group of great people, and only grow when it really starts to hurt." That rarely happens.Since large, multisite, and offshore development is going to happen, we would like to share what we have tried or seen at the intersection of these domains with lean and agile product development principles and practices. 2 Thinking and Organizational ToolsWhen Bas was a member of the leadership team of a large product group, he frequently (in meetings) asked, "Why do we have this policy? ... What will happen to the organizational system if we do that?" Months later a member of the team told Craig, "It drove me nuts to keep hearing those questions. But later, I appreciated it." Bas wasn't trying to be annoying; he was trying to suggest and encourage systems thinking a thinking tool (1) to consider the deeper dynamics of the development system as a whole, (2) to understand how a system became the way it is, and (3) to reconsider assumptions underlying the existing organization.When people are introduced to Scrum with its short timeboxed development iterations, they first see it as a localized prac