Scaling Agile in the large

Scaling Agile presents a number challenges:
1. How to organize a large team (say 50+ engineers)?
2. How to deliver a shippable product at the end of each iteration, where there are multiple simultaneous releases particularly if there is one code base and the dependencies are not aligned?
3. Communication and daily standup with remote teams

Agile
Average team size: 7 plus or minus 2
o smaller better as there is less communication overhead [recall (n * (n -1))/2]

Agile team delivers value
o Your product owner should determine what features grouped together is a releasable entity of value.
o If you have multiple parallel tracks that have teams working on a bit from each track which you cannot release any of it as there is one code base and the dependencies are not aligned, your product owner should prioritize and assign value (perhaps the highest valued feature from each parallel track should be prioritized into the 1st iteration).

Agile teams keep things simple
o Where possible select teams at the same location to work together - people that are collocated have the opportunity to have high bandwidth communication
o Keep teams to average agile team size – smaller is better
o Have scrum of scrum meetings (e.g. team at one location can have their daily scrum and a representative from that team attend another scrum mtg with representatives from other locations).

The Nokia Test
First, are you doing iterative development?
• Iterations must be timeboxed to less than 4 weeks
• Software features must be tested and working at the end of each iteration
• The iteration must start before specification is complete

The next part of the test checks whether you are doing Scrum
• You know who the product owner is
• There is a product backlog prioritized by business value
• The product backlog has estimates created by the team
• The team generates burndown charts and knows its velocity
• There are no project managers (or anyone else) disrupting the work of the team

Takeaways
 Try the Nokia test.
 Learn what works and what does not work for your team and organization; adapt and evolve.