Organizing at Scale: Feature Teams vs. Component Teams – Part 1

While continuing my work with a number of larger enterprises facing the cultural change, new practice adoption and organizational challenges of a large scale agile transformation, the topic has again come up as to how to organize large numbers of agile teams to effectively implement agile and optimize value stream delivery.
For the smaller software enterprise, [...]

The Simple Math Behind TDD?

For those who have followed this blog or read the book, you might know that I called Chapter 13 of SSA “Concurrent Testing” and not TDD (Test-Driven Development). I talked about TDD in the book, but I didn’t specifically prescribe it. TDD says:

Write the test
Run it and watch it fail (meaning build it permanently into [...]

Jeff Sutherland’s Sprint Emergency Landing Procedure

Last week, I gave a talk on Scaling Agility at Agilis 2008 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Yes, Iceland has an active agile community within their population of some 300,000-400,000. A local consultancy Sprettur, hosted this conference and invited guest speakers including Jeff Sutherland and myself. I was somewhat surprised to see the advanced level of agile [...]

The Agile Enterprise Acid Test – Updated

In a prior post, I referred to a post by Paul Beavers of BMC (Is it Possible to be Half-Agile?) which gave his perspective on the agile acid test- the quintessential test of whether or not an organization is truly achieving agility at enterprise scale. In my post, I also provided my viewpoint on the [...]

Does Prioritizing Backlog by ROI Work?

For those following the “Big Picture” series and the recent post Enterprise Agility-The Big Picture (4) Backlog, I just saw a number of posts from Luke Hohmann at Agile Commons describing some of the methods and challenges associated with prioritizing backlog.
If found the post Why Prioritizing Your Product Backlog for ROI Doesn’t Work particularly relevant, [...]

The Agile “Shine On” (Visibility and Truth in Agile)

Recently the post “Zero to Fear in 60 Seconds” appeared in Agile Juice . This great post highlights some of the challenges with the transparency and fact-based status assessment that agile purports to deliver. Simply put, it’s not unusual (at least initially) that the apparent visibility provided by the daily standups and story status [...]

The New New Product Development Game and the Roots of Scrum

I was recently doing some research on prospective agile governance models for a company in the throes of understanding how to manage the entropy of a large number of newly energized and empowered agile teams. For perspective on the problem, I returned to the following article for guidance: The New New Product Development Game. This [...]

On Agile Maturity and Hardening Iterations

I’ve noted a teams need for an occasionally “hardening iteration” in SSA Chapter 13 as well as in a number of posts (Release Planning at Enterprise Scale: an Inside-out Narrative.) The hardening iteration is dedicated to eliminating technical debt, such as minor refactors, bugs, testing across multiple platforms, final QA, docs etc., that is [...]

Meeting Deadlines – “Tiger Teams” vs. Agile Project Management Practices

Often times when introducing some of the basic agile project management practices to new teams (for example, the daily standup) some of the more experienced (ok, older) team members comment on the fact that these techniques look a lot like the techniques they used in the past when their projects were in deadline [...]

Ah Ah, The Daily Build Revisited ….. Revisited

“We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action.
There are many things one doesn’t understand; therefore, we ask them, why don’t you just go ahead and take action?
You realize how little you know, and you face your own failures and redo it again, and at the second trial you realize another mistake . [...]