Practices for Scaling Lead and Agile Development

The Introduction section of the book takes on the issue upfront - the companies grappling with a large scale software development work.The section makes it very clear that adopting Agile practices doesn't help either, in fact, it complicates the issues.The section candidly confesses that the authors are not attempting to create a bible, rather they are sharing their experience.Truthful, uncoated, shareable experience.



The book starts with the tools and actions that are required with higher emphasis for a large, multisite software development that follows Agile practices instead of traditional models like waterfall.There are twelve such chapters that focuses on actions and tools.It starts with testing, then moves to product management, planning and coordination.Subsequent five chapters focus on requirements management (PBI), design, architecture, legacy code integration, and continuous integration.All these chapters are organized by a set of takeaway points.Each such point are well illustrated, yet not too big.More importantly, those are relevant takeaway points.




The final three chapters focus on multisite development, offshore development, and outsourcing.These three chapters make this book an exceptional one.All the books on Agile practices I had read before this one summarily dismissed the idea of offshoring.While the market forces compelled many companies to try shipping software development work overseas, the mutual agreements followed dated contracting procedures.Relationship between onshore and offshore too, remained significantly patchy.The authors took on these issues directly.They have brought up the issues on onshore and offshore collaboration, use of video calls for communications, and importance of mutual visits by the team members to each others' locations.The authors showed clearly what it takes to make a large multisite team function like a distributed team instead of a dispersed team.The way pain points have been addressed, that can be brought up only through hard earned experiences, and the authors deserve credits for sharing these observations so candidly.



Many of the points don't resonate well with my type of thinking.As example, the authors emphasized on avoiding fixed fee fixed scope engagements, which I don't think buyers would be comfortable with.But then, the authors didn't write a book of standards, they were merely documenting their experience.For each readers with significant experience in software development, there would be points in this book to disagree with.That's the most unique characteristic of this book.



I would recommend this book to all Agile practitioners.



This review was originally posted at by yours truly.
Full Post