Scaling Software Agility Best Practices for Large Enterprises

by Leffingwell, Dean

• ISBN13: 9780321458193
• ISBN10: 0321458192
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-02-26
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

"Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the ls"stigmars" of ls"agile only works for small projectsrs" 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 Leffingwellrs"s bookScaling Software Agilityfills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwellrs"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 "Therers"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. Leffingwellrs"s observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: hers"s been there, done that, and has seen whatrs"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. InScaling 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 Doesnrs"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

Author Biography

Dean Leffingwell is a renowned software development methodologist, author, and software team coach who has spent his career helping software teams meet their goals. He is the former founder and CEO of Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro, and a former vice president at Rational Software, where he was responsible for the commercialization of RUP. During the last five years, in his role as both an independent consultant and as advisor/methodologist to Rally Software, Mr. Leffingwell has applied his experience to the organizational challenge of implementing agile methods at scale with entrepreneurial teams as well as distributed, multinational corporations. These experiences form much of the basis for this book. Mr. Leffingwell is also the lead author of Managing Software Requirements, Second Edition: A Use Case Approach (Addison-Wesley, 2003).

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xvii
Preface	p. xxi
Acknowledgments	p. xxvii
About the Author	p. xxix
Overview of Software Agility	p. 1
Introduction to Agile Methods	p. 5
Achieving Competitive Advantage in a Software Economy	p. 5
Enter Agile Methods	p. 6
Agile at Scale	p. 7
A Look at the Methods	p. 8
The Trend to Agile Adoption	p. 10
Business Benefits of Software Agility	p. 11
A Brief Look at XP, Scrum, and RUP	p. 13
Summary	p. 15
Why the Waterfall Model Doesn't Work	p. 17
Problems with the Model	p. 19
Assumptions Underlying the Model	p. 20
Enter Corrective Actions via Agile Methods	p. 26
The Essence of XP	p. 29
What Is XP?	p. 29
What's So Controversial about XP?	p. 30
What's So Extreme about XP?	p. 30
The Fundamental Tenet of XP	p. 31
The Values, Principles, and Practices of XP	p. 33
The Process Model for XP	p. 38
Applicability of the Method	p. 39
Suggested Reading	p. 40
The Essence of Scrum	p. 41
What Is Scrum?	p. 41
The Roles in Scrum	p. 42
The Philosophical Roots of Scrum	p. 42
The Values, Principles, and Practices of Scrum	p. 43
Key Practices of Scrum	p. 44
The Fundamental Tenet of Scrum: Empirical Process Control	p. 45
The Process Model for Scrum	p. 46
On Scrum and Organizational Change	p. 48
Applicability of the Method	p. 48
Suggested Reading	p. 49
The Essence of RUP	p. 51
What Is RUP?	p. 51
Key Characteristics of RUP	p. 51
Roots of RUP	p. 52
Agile RUP Variants	p. 60
Applicability of the Method	p. 61
Suggested Reading	p. 62
Lean Software, DSDM, and FDD	p. 63
Lean Software Development	p. 63
Dynamic Systems Development Method	p. 65
Feature-Driven Development	p. 70
The Essence of Agile	p. 75
What Are We Changing with Agile?	p. 75
The Heartbeat of Agile: Working Code in a Short Time Box	p. 81
Summary	p. 85
The Challenge of Scaling Agile	p. 87
Apparent Impediments of the Methods	p. 88
Impediments of the Enterprise	p. 90
Summary	p. 94
Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale	p. 95
The Define/Build/Test Component Team	p. 101
What Is the Define/Build/Test Component Team?	p. 102
Eliminating the Functional Silos	p. 104
The Roles and Responsibilities of an Agile Component Team	p. 106
Creating Self-Organizing, Self-Managing Define/Build/Test Teams	p. 109
Distributed Teams	p. 114
Two Levels of Planning and Tracking	p. 115
A Generalized Agile Framework	p. 116
Summary: Two Levels of Planning	p. 120
Mastering the Iteration	p. 123
Iteration: The Heartbeat of Agility	p. 123
The Standard, Two-Week Iteration?	p. 123
Planning and Executing the Iteration	p. 124
Iteration Planning	p. 125
Iteration Execution	p. 129
Iteration Tracking and Adjusting	p. 132
Iteration Cadence Calendar	p. 135
Smaller, More Frequent Releases	p. 139
Benefits of Small Releases	p. 139
Defining and Scheduling the Release	p. 141
Planning the Release	p. 144
Release Tracking	p. 147
The Release Roadmap	p. 149
Agile at Scale Preview: Release Planning and Tracking in the Large	p. 150
Concurrent Testing	p. 155
Introduction to Agile Testing	p. 155
Agile Testing Principles	p. 156
Unit Testing	p. 158
Acceptance Testing	p. 160
Component Testing	p. 162
System and Performance Testing	p. 162
Summary: Agile Testing Strategy in a Nutshell	p. 164
Continuous Integration	p. 169
What Is Continuous Integration?	p. 169
Continuous Integration	p. 171
The Three Steps to Continuous Integration	p. 172
What Is Continuous Integration Success?	p. 175
Regular Reflection and Adaptation	p. 179
Iteration Retrospective	p. 180
Release Retrospective	p. 184
Creating the Agile Enterprise189
Intentional Architecture	p. 195
What Is Software Architecture?	p. 195
Agile and Architecture	p. 197
On Refactoring and Systems of Scale	p. 201
What Are You Bu
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Software Methodology Career Phase I: Experiences at RELA and Requisite, Inc. I have been committed to improving software engineering and software development management practices throughout my career. While that goal has been a constant, I now recognize three distinct stages of my understanding of software development practice and maturity. In Phase I, I was the CEO of RELA, Inc., where we developed software for others on a contract basis. RELA developed a wide variety of software applications ranging from stomach-churning adventure park rides to life-sustaining medical devices. Because the software we wrote was always for others, we were constantly aware of the need to "build the right thing." Our individual livelihoods, our company, and its stakeholders all depended on our ability to understand what problems our solutions needed to address and how to apply effective best practices in achieving that solution. In order to do so, we depended on many of the rigorous practices based on the waterfall method in use at that time. Indeed, some of our customers, and other key regulatory agencies such as the FDA, mandated its use, so we followed it prescriptively even as we tried to improve it. While it is entertaining now for many of us to criticize and make fun of the methods we employed,the fact is that the waterfall method was a substantial improvement over the cut-and-try methods of the past, and more importantly, it delivered results.Much of my focus at that time was on the requirements process, because that is where the critical discovery happened, solution behavior was defined, and our contracts were based. That experience led me to my next career as founder and CEO of Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro, a product solution for requirements management. At Requisite, we advanced and developed requirements practices and products, so in a sense we became experts in thefront endof the lifecycle. We sold Requisite to Rational in 1997, and I embarked on Phase II of my software development process career. Software Methodology Career Phase II: Experiences at Rational Software In this phase, I was a senior executive at Rational Software and was involved in the promulgation of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the Rational Unified Process (RUP). At Rational, I had the good fortune of working directly with thought leaders such as Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, James Rumbaugh, Walker Royce, and Philippe Kruchten. During this time, my coauthor, Don Widrig, and I also published the first edition of the Addison-Wesley textManaging Software Requirements(2000). Then our thinking was based on object orientation, and that technique provided additional flexibility in our development methods and additional resiliency in the software we wrote. It also led to a software process that was fundamentally different from the waterfall method and one that is characterized as being iterative and incremental. In this method, each iteration was a working piece of code that could be objectively assessed and evaluated. This method was far more agile than my prior experiences: we were no longer forced to rely solely on intermediate work productsdocuments, design reviews, and the likebut could see and measure tangible progress. Rational codified that process in a written process description, the Rational Unified Process, and marketed and applied that process with good success across the industry. In addition, we applied the process in the development and release of Rational Suites, which required the coordination of as many as 800 team members in four countries. We released Rational Suites twice per year, each with an integrated set of products and a common install. Rational was eventually purchased by IBM, and today RUP is marketed under the auspices of IBM's Rational Software Division and is in use by hundreds of thousands of practitio