Re: How well does Agile scale?

Hello Adam,

Our company has over 70 developers and over 50 testers and we started
doing Scrum 3.5 years ago.  We went through a lot of pain to figure
out how to make it work in a large scale scenario.

In our case we crossed a major threshold by re-organizing the whole
development organization over a year and half ago.  Basically we were
introduced to Lean and that provided a set of tools that allow us to
identify several issues.  Probably the most useful tool is Value
Stream Mapping.  Looking at our products and processes, we change our
organization and our teams.

Most of our Product Owners and their managers move to a new
department that determines the stuff we need to build and in what
order.  The POs still seat close to the teams and work with them all
the time, but they are part of an organization now that is only focus
on the business side.  On the development side we focus on building
teams to match the business organization created by this new product
strategy department.  They divide everything by business lines, so we
create teams to work on those business lines.  In essence, we end up
with a bunch of feature teams.

We have 27 Scrum teams.  Of those 27 teams, we have what we have 21
customer facing teams.  They are changing the product our customers
use.  Because we are so large and our customers can be large
organizations as well, we have a group of teams who are mostly
infrastructure (build, environment management, etc.) and specialty
testing teams (performance, security and product acceptance).  They
do not change the product but either test the product or support the
other teams work.  We have a few framework type teams.

Now that most of the decisions regarding business value are outside
of product development then we can concentrate on building strong
teams.  We now focus on practices, standards and technology.

As part of the re-org we brought Jeff Sutherland to teach everyone in
our top management (Senior VPs, VPs and Directors) Scrum and
introduce them to how other companies handle their Enterprise Agile
implementation.

On the development side, we re-organize our Scrum meetings and added
one meeting for top management.

Team members go to Daily Scrum
Scrum Master goes to Business Line Scrum of Scrums – Keep Strategy
management aware of what the team is working on every day.
All Scrum Masters go to All Dev Scrum of Scrums – Scrum Masters bring
impediments they can not resolve every day to this meeting.  The
meeting is run by a Director who is responsible for working on
removing those impediments as soon as possible.

Development Management has their own Daily Scrum where we reviewed
those impediments and other issues and try to resolve them as soon as
possible.

These are all short meetings to bring everyone in sync every morning.

Once a week the management of Dev and Strategy get together to review
how we are doing on our release and discuss any priority changes or
major unresolved impediments (MetaScrum).

At the team level, we implemented some changes as well:

Get teams to think more about Business Value by putting an emphasis
on business value delivered (tell me when the story is done, not when
the task is completed).  Burn down story points, not hourly tasks.

Change Retrospective to stop keeping lists of start-stop-continue and
focus on team impediments.  Scrum Master keeps list of impediments in
priority order and team focuses on removing one impediment at the
time.  In essence, we do a more Lean retrospective.
Empower teams to manage their talent.  Teams decide who joins their
team during recruiting process and they can move people out of the
team (go to the bench) if the person becomes an impediment and are
not helping the team.  We evaluate teams, not individuals.

One of the recent things we do to constantly evaluate teams is to use
Henrik Kniberg's Scrum checklist which we added the following section:

High Performing team behaviors:
Team writes test code and product code together
Team runs all their tests as often as possible (at least once every
day)
Team keeps tests passing all the time and stops working when a test
fails
Team runs their unit tests before check-in their code
When a defect is found, the team creates a test case first to verify
defect and then fixes the issue

I can keep going, but it will be an even longer posting.  We also
have a few new changes coming up now like an Enterprise Definition of
Done (EDoD).  If you want to contact me directly, we can schedule a
call and go over some of your specific questions.  I just did an hour
and half call with a company last week to share some of the changes
we implemented.

Best Regards,

Rafael

--- In agile-testing@..., "Adam White" <adam_white99@...>
wrote: do
> scrum of
> > scrums on a daily basis so that everyone stays on the same page.
CI
> and
> > builds can be a challenge if you have a huge code base and builds
> take a
> > long time. Sometimes each team builds their own stuff throughout
> the day or
> > the iteration and there is one big build a night or every few
days -
>  I don't
> > think this is great and I'd like also like to know how other
teams a for
> Testers
> > and Agile Teams_ (Addison-Wesley 2009)
> > http://www.agiletester.ca
> > http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net
> > http://lisacrispin.blogspot.com
> >
>