Scaling Software Agility

The trend toward more agile and even extreme development practices is the most significant dynamic the software development community has experienced since the application of the waterfall model in the 1970s. While still controversial, the benefits of agility are undeniable to those who have mastered the practices. Agile practices, however, have been defined and recommended primarily to small team environments where co-location, ready access to interactive customers, and small team size are the defining rules. As agile methods have progressed, it is becoming apparent to larger, enterprise companies how they can benefit from application of these principles, and this new book provides a proven recipe for the application of agility to larger scale development. In addition to an overview of current agile methods, Leffingwell presents seven team skills of agility that readily scale to the enterprise and concludes with a description of additional organizational capabilities that companies can master in order to achieve the benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale.The trend to agile and even extreme development practices is the most significant dynamic in software development since the invention of the waterfall model. While still controversial in some circles, the benefits of agility, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices. Agile practices, however, have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams where co-location, ready access to customers, and small team size are the defining rule.Are the benefits of agility to be denied to those larger software enterprises who don't share these simple paradigms? Are larger companies forever relegated to delay-prone, big bang, waterfall failures? Or can these innovative new practices be applied to large-scale development requiring coordination of 100 or even 1,000 team members to achieve?In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes the application of agile methods to enterprise class development. Part I of this book 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.Scaling Software Agility will be invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers, and 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.