Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)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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“Companies have been implementing large agile projects fora number of years, but the ‘stigma’ of ‘agile only works for smallprojects’ continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and arallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agileliterature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developinglarge projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell’s book Scaling Software Agilityfills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large projectissues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-levelrelease planning, and team organization. Leffingwell’s book is anecessary guide for large projects and large organizations making thetransition to agile development.”–Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management“There’stension between building software fast and delivering software thatlasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market andmaintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility,Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among theseforces. Leffingwell’s observations of the problem, his advice on thesolution, and his description of the resulting best practices come fromexperience: he’s been there, done that, and has seen what’s worked.”–Grady Booch, IBM FellowAgiledevelopment practices, while still controversial in some circles, offerundeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness tochanging customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agilepractices 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.
PartIII describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilitiesthat companies can master to achieve the full benefits of softwareagility on an enterprise scale.
Thisbook is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel,managers and team leads, as well as to executives of softwareorganizations whose objective is to increase the quality andproductivity of the software development process but who are faced withall 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

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