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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Good introduction but missing some of the hard parts, May 2, 2007
I've long been switching between 3 or 4 stars rating for this book. So let me start by saying that my 3 starts means that the book is really worth reading, however some parts of the book do not go deep enough, in my opinion.
Scaling Software Agility tackles the question "How to do agile development in large systems". The experience in the book seems to mainly be build on one project in BMC. In the first part of the book, Dean goes over the most popular agile methods and gived a quick introduction. He then attempts to extract common parts for the methods. In part two he picks out 7 practices and claims that they scale without modification. In the last part of the book, he adds 7 new practices, which, in his opinion, are needed for large agile projects.
Personally I've been working with a lot of large agile projects and thus was very interested in this book, especially to learn new things or see if Dean had similar problems. I was slightly dissapointed, but let me explain.
One of the fundamental points in the book is that agile development can be executed on team level. The unit of work is what Dean calls "component teams". In his book, he does not cover the question of code ownership, but the component team organization suggests a traditional organization based on the architecture of the system. This is confirmed by the problems he mentions, which are inherent to component teams. These are the need for more architecture, the need for much dependency management between the component teams and several others. Dean keeps with the traditional methods of organizing projects, he doesn't question it. The component teams thus lose part of the end-customer focus and more management and architecture is needed. Slowly parts of waterfall development are re-emerging. The book does NOT cover the organization around feature teams and the scaling of practices like shared code ownership. Also it doesn't talk about continuous integration in relationship to the team structure etc. A missed opportunity.
In part two, Dean describes 7 practices which scale without adjustment. I totally agree that these practices scale, but there is some need for doing them slightly different. As example, "how do we coordinate the different planning meetings?" The book explains the traditional practice but does NOT talk about how to actually scale it. It doesn't mention different problems that might happen and different possible solutions. It seems to just cover the surface of the subject.
The last chapters about how agile development will influence the rest of the organization were good. They touch a subject that is currently rarely covered.
In conclusion, a useful book to read. I would not follow all recommendations and more needs to be written on the subject. Still, definitively worth reading.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
No insights into how toscale Agile, December 15, 2007
If you are looking into insights to scaling Agile projects you will be dissapointed.
The auther largly discribes the outlines of different development methodologies in the book, Xp, Scrum, DSDM, RUP. It takes to page 87 before the actual content of the book (scaling) even begins.
But when push comes to shove, the authors silently reverts to the basic monotholic arcitecture message "agile is good in small teams, but shall not be trusted in large environments". That is saying "I have no new insights into managing the impediments of large organisation".
What I was expecting was some new insights into of breaking down communication and cultural barriers that are in the way of scaling Agile projects, lean software techologies in the large etc.
At is best, the book provides a good compilation of development methologies, at it's worst, it mixes up the cards so bad that you will end up even more confused than before you started.
If you are looking into scaling agile, "The Enterprices and scrum" and any of Jeff Sutherlands scrum-of-scrum papers are a better bet.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Great insight for the wannabe agile enterprise, December 31, 2007
I found this book to be an excellent recap of agile concepts, and an encouraging introduction to how to put agile into practice in the enterprise. I particularly appreciate the recommendations for measurement at both the team and enterprise level.
I will use the recommendations of the book to make my distributed teams and development processes more agile, but there are still a few things that seem to be missing in the large system arena. For example: dealing with production issues in the middle of a sprint, getting the infrastructure groups (DBAs, messaging experts, integration tool jockeys, etc.) into the mix. I'd love to see more case studies involving big distributed systems with complex integration challenges.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Covers all of the critical roadblocks that are sure to be in your path, April 13, 2007
As someone who has guided many enterprise organizations in scaling Scrum, this book covers all of the critical roadblocks that are sure to be in your path. Scaling Software Agility is a must read for anyone in a technical or business leadership capacity considering advancing agile beyond a few teams or projects. It combines the organizational influences from Scrum with the development practices of Extreme Programming (XP) and balances it with some of the best practices from the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to provide a scalable agile approach.
Dean Leffingwell eases you into scaling agile in a very comfortable way - first through reviewing many of the existing methods, then through showing how many of the common practices you are implementing today actually scale, and finally through recognizing the key differences and approaches required in scaling agile to a large enterprise. His many years experience in agile (and more importantly non-agile) environments come through in the way he walks you through his discovery of this scalable agile approach.
Dean also doesn't hold back any punches in his critique of agile practices and what is needed, or needs to be changed, to scale them. He is quite direct in his opposition to XP's emergent architectural approach and its inability to scale - rather he introduces Intentional Architecture. Is it too prescriptive to be agile? If you are an enterprise architecture developing systems of systems, you might not think so. Dean provides some excellent ideas to help balance architectural discovery and planning to keep your runway long and clear.
Dean is perhaps best known for his work in Requirements Management. In this book he visits each of the agile, iterative and lean requirements approaches to explain how a balanced, just-in-time approach provides the right mix to scale. I find that this is often the biggest change to most enterprise organizations that tend to write verbose specifications and have the most concerns about project scope and governance. Dean provides a clear picture of how to manage requirements efficiently.
While each of the chapters in the later half of this book could fill an entire book itself, Dean does an excellent job in presenting the critical elements of each and just enough to help get you going down the right path. Yet I would have preferred to see more depth in organizational structures which influence agile scalability - an area that I find particularly troublesome for most large companies. However, as Dean said in describing his book, "If this book were any thicker, it wouldn't be agile."
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Great Agile book for teams of all sizes!, March 31, 2007
This is my new favorite book! Dean does a great job giving practical and important information to teams of all sizes. You don't have to be in an enterprise size team to learn from Dean's experiences. All of Part II will be helpful to teams. Part III has a lot of information key to your success adopting and adapting agile for bigger teams, but even smaller ones can gain from his insights. I highly recommend this book.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Dean is a master..., April 19, 2007
I'm a serial software entrepreneur, working on my 3rd venture funded software company. I've known Dean Leffingwell for nearly five years now, and he introduced agile development to Ping Identity about three years ago. I've never seen software developed so consistently, and with such quality as I've experienced here, under Dean's guidance.
We've been receiving the benefits of agile since then. Last year, we had 22 releases across 3 major product lines, and not a one of them was a single day late. We support hundreds of Fortune 1000 enterprises with a single person dedicated to support -- the software is that solid. Dean does a case study of our methods in Chapter 19, "Managing Highly Distributed Development."
The agile methods Dean espouses in this book are delivering productivity and quality benefits far in excess of what I have seen teams deliver in my past. The net result is that we deliver software at such a clip that competition can simple not keep pace. Not only is the ROI there, but team morale across the company is higher. Everyone knows that engineering delivers on time, and that in turn has every other department taking their commitments more seriously.
I highly recommend this book to any executive (with the exception of my competitors) who seek to increase the productivity, quality, and time to market of their software processes.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Agile methods are "crossing the chasm", March 28, 2007
If you're new to the agile process world, you may look at this book with a mixture of apprehension and skepticism. I would not blame you. Agile processes may seem the place of strange expressions--sprint, velocity, scrum (is this a rugby game?), extreme programming (are we jumping off cliffs with a snowboard?), user stories, epics and sagas (is this a writers' workshop?)--and weird social rituals--pair programming, user retrospectives, huddles or daily stand-up meetings (are developers and testers now hugging each other at work?). Agile teams also seem to consume inordinate amounts of colorful sticky notes and 4Ũ6 index cards to cover any walls they can find, and the whole thing appears informal to a fault. We are in Dilbert-land. But make no mistake: agile software development processes are "crossing the chasm," to use the term coined by Jeffrey Moore, and we are today far beyond the funny, geeky jargon and into effective, productive, and scalable development methods.
Agile projects are carefully planned, but they are planned differently, and the plan is revised and refined more often. You may also have been told that agile methods have their "sweet spots" around small teams (7 to 12 people), preferably collocated, for short projects (2 to 9 months), making them inapplicable in your own environment of large, long-lived, globally distributed software development endeavors. This too is all changing rapidly as numerous projects around the world are pushing these boundaries, and they are achieving success in higher productivity and higher quality of their software outcomes.
Herein lays Dean's major contribution to be discovered in the body of this book. Rising above the debate between the various families of agile processes--XP, Scrum, Lean, DSDM, FDD, Rational Unified Process (RUP) and so on (which are nicely presented), he establishes what is common among them as a baseline before he proceeds to his main objective of showing how to scale these agile approaches beyond their existing sweet spot. He is not introducing a new agile process to add to this already long roster, but rather he extends them all with a set of new practices, practices that live at a higher level, both technical and managerial, and that embrace and integrate existing established agile practices (the ones with the funny names). In addition to synthesizing the best engineering practices that are common among these methods, he also describe methods aiming at the governance of larger agile projects: topics such as release planning; handling large, distributed teams; establishing the business value of the project; and dealing with large, long-lived developments, to mention only a few.
The author's work is not academic, he's not merely positing some new bold conjectures for you to try out. His advice is rooted in years of active, hands-on practice in many companies, many projects, in a wide range of industries, from life-sustaining medical equipment to software tools, from amusement park rides to large-scale IT infrastructure applications.
Philippe Kruchten
Vancouver, BC Canada
PS:Yes, I am the same guy who wrote the foreword. I have not changed my mind since.
The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction, Third Edition
The Rational Unified Process Made Easy: A Practitioner's Guide to Rational Unified Process
Software Engineering Processes: With the UPEDU
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Dean Leffingwell Hits the Mark, April 23, 2007
As a co-founder of a small start-up company that grew to 160 people, survived the internet bubble / burst and ultimately was acquired, I never truly understood why large software companies continuously fail to convert themselves to more agile driven organizations.
That is until immediately after our acquisition. For the past year, my team and I have successfully convinced many crucial business owners throughout the organization that agile driven concepts as described by Dean Leffingwell are crucial to delivering better software faster.
Unfortunately, even though we have made tremendous progress in several key areas, we have been unsuccessful in truly influencing other organizations throughout the company. The past year has been an extremely frustrating experience in many aspects. Furthermore, no matter how hard I tried to learn and research proven methods, I rarely found extensive material to help us on our journey.
For the first time, a book accomplished the missing void we saught so hard to find. Dean's book truly hits the mark and accurately describes why so many companies have such a hard time converting. He provides history behind the agile methodologies in order to provide proper context. The history lesson is informative even for individuals who have a strong background. He completes the book by breaking out agile concepts that scale regardless of size and more importantly, he also covers several concepts that if implemented, help a large company adapt to more agile best practices.
My only knock on the book is that I wish he would have spent more time on the one key issue that continues to kill us - the need for organizational change. However, after thinking about this issue for a while, what can an author really do to improve a company's ability to change the organizational structure? Not much I am afraid...
This is a fantastic book that everyone should read - even folks that work in small companies. I am confident that the reader will walk away with at least a few good ideas to leverage now or as the company grows. If you already work at a large company, the book will at a minimum give you some peace of mind and hopefully will serve as a vehicle to encourage change by others.
Thanks for an outstanding book!
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Great book for large scale agile projects, June 5, 2007
Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises successfully answers the question how do you take what works in Agile and apply that to large enterprises and projects. As a development manager who deals mostly in large scale projects I found the book an interesting analysis on how agile approaches can successfully be applied to large projects. Many of the approaches described by Dean I had already discovered, some other approaches described provided new insights to managing large projects.
One of my biggest complaints with Agile these days is most people do not fully understand what it really means. The end result is you get developers and tech leads arguing that they don't need to document their processes nor analyze their situation all they need to do is write code to get the benefits of Agile. I would guess that Dean has encountered the same situation with his projects as a full 94 pages in the book describe very well the different flavors of Agile including XP, Scrum, RUP, and Lean.
After ensuring the reader has an understanding of Agile, the book then transitions into the meat of the topic by discussing the 7 Agile team practices that scale.
- Define/Build/Test Component team
- Two levels of planning and tracking
- Mastering the iteration
- Smaller, more frequent releases
- Concurrent testing
- Continuous Integration
- Regular introspection and adaptation to new approaches
The author points out how these traditional agile topics can be successfully applied to large scale organizations and projects.
The author then wraps up the book with an excellent description of how you work Agile into the overall Enterprise. Pointing out how Agile actually provides more development structure which actually reduces cost, improves quality, and empowers developers to succeed.
Overall this is one of the best Agile software development management books I have read and would recommend this strongly to others.
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The Practical Guide to Agile Enterprise, April 15, 2007
Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises
by Dean Leffingwell
(The Agile Software Development Series)
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (February 26, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0321458192
ISBN-13: 978-0321458193
Great work by Dean Leffingwell. Dean describe in a very pragmatic way the best practices and guidelines to follow for a real scalable agile adoption.
Agile is a short word but a big spectrum of initiatives, methodologies, practices, etc... what to use and when to used it's the real challenge, especially for large distributed projects and organizations.
The book is full of advices based on experience that will guide you in the selection key features from the agile family that will help the adoption of Agile in non-trivial projects or organizations.
The author also addressed many of the common misunderstanding about Agile by pointing out key comparables features between Agile and more traditional approaches of developing software.
Part III of the book covers some very interesting and useful topics (Intentional Architecture, Lean, Managing Distributed Development, and Measuring Business Performance, among others) while describing the necessary transformation in order to create an Agile Enterprise.
If you are an Agile practitioner you will find value in the book by looking at the advices and guidelines suggested by the author. If you are new to Agile the book will give you a good overview of many of the top Agile methods and practices in order for you to decide the direction your group or organization will take.
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