RE: Re: How well does Agile scale?

Hi Adam,

 

We have ~70 people working on 4 products with a size of ~ 5 MLOC. We
moved from a more traditional development process towards an agile
development model over the last 2 years. My experience is that Agile is
a journey, not a destination. I talked about this at the StarEast
conference this year
(http://www.sqe.com/ConferenceArchive/StarEast2008/SessionsWednesday.htm
l#W8). In this presentation I also talked about the challenge we had
with a distributed environment (I think in a big company you will always
have to deal with that), where we had to find an approach to keep the
communication costs low, but also utilize the existing resources in a
best way.

 

Regarding success: We just released another major version for 3 of the 4
products, which is the first real version where we applied a lot of the
agile practices.  There are a lot of very positive things that happened,
some things need to get improved (got identified during a
retrospective), but overall I think it worked very well and agile is
definitely the way to go forward (we are ready for the next bumps on the
road ;=)).

 

If you are interested in more information or want to share some
experiences, please do not hesitate to contact me.

 

Best regards

Didi

 

Dietmar Strasser

Director QA

Lifecycle Quality Management

Borland

Freistaedter Strasse 400

Austria, A-4040 Linz

+43 (70) 33 66 94 - 4014 Direct

+43 (70) 33 66 94 - 4022 Fax

www.borland.com <http://www.borland.com/>

dietmar.strasser@... <mailto:dietmar.strasser@...>

 

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software on your terms.

 

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From: agile-testing@...
[mailto:agile-testing@...] On Behalf Of Adam White
Sent: Mittwoch, 10. Dezember 2008 19:15
To: agile-testing@...
Subject: [agile-testing] Re: How well does Agile scale?

 

Matt,

I'm not interested in how the work gets organized - i'm interested in
knowing if anyone has been successful with a team of 40 developers
organized into scrum teams.

I'm more interested in how other people have made agile/scrum work
with this size group (or larger) in the context of external
enterprise software development than I am in how my company is
organizing it our context.

Adam

--- In agile-testing@...
<mailto:agile-testing%40yahoogroups.com> , "heusserm" <matt.heusser@...>

wrote:
>
> --- In agile-testing@...
<mailto:agile-testing%40yahoogroups.com> , "Adam White" <adam_white99@>
> wrote:
> >
> > I'm wondering how well agile scales as the teams get larger. Does
> > anyone have any experiences they can share about using scrum on a
team
> > of 35-40 developers and testers for an enterprise level product?
> >
>
> How are those teams currently organized? What are they working on?
>
> McKinsey and Company have, if I recall correctly, thousands of
> employees doing knowledge work in an agile fashion. You can read
> about then in "Liberation Management", by Tom Peters. So I suspect
> certain types of work can be sructured to be accomplished in an
agile
> fashion.
>
> So tell us how the teams are currently organized, and what they are
> working on, and maybe we can help. Organizing the work of a
theoretic
> al scrum team of 40 people with no context is, as I see it, a chase
> after the wind.
>
> --heusser
> blog: xndev.blogspot.com
>