Scaling agile software development

Reader Poll The question we asked on Monday - whether agile development could scale - certainly put the cat among the pigeons.

There were undoubtedly those for whom the answer was a resounding ‘no!’ – not least because for many, Agile is predicated on the basis of small teams. Big teams = big problems, we were told, and Agile is not going to help resolve them. Here’s some example feedback.

“Keep It Simple S****” – When the projects becomes too big, no matter the methodology, it will fail.

The sheer amount of “work stuff” that mires a large project will bog a team of 500 – but if you’re controlling a workforce of that size you’re certainly not thinking in an Agile way.

You can call it agile even when it’s a mammoth floundering in a tar pit, but that doesn’t make it so.

A major bone of contention seemed to be adoption of Agile as a clever term, rather than a distinct way of doing things. “Sometimes managers hear great buzzwords but don’t get beyond the first paragraph,” said one comment. “Agile is something that should have been kept secret from the marketing depts,” said another.

From the wealth of comments you provided, it's clear that Agile is more than just marketing: “It’s not that hard to scale, providing you know what you are doing. I’ve done it again and again with multiple enterprise customers,” said a self-confessed Agile coach/consultant.

But are they right – or like the Joe Satrianis of this world (there, I’ve mentioned him again), is it just that when such people are involved, everything seems to work?

It seems the key to answering this is how agile projects are structured. The fundamental principle is be ‘divide and conquer’ – that is, if running a project with several hundred people is always going to be difficult, far better then to consider it as a series of smaller projects. “If the task can be broken down into small enough pieces then it could still use agile methods,” we are told. And indeed, “Agile can actually make it easier to work with bigger teams, because it helps you break things down into rational chunks”.

Complexity will grow inevitably as the project grows. Returning again to the comments, there is some consensus in how large-scale projects can be run as a number of smaller-scale Agile projects, but with two caveats: that the role of management is to deal with the complexity and communications, and that the challenge becomes how to bring together and integrate the different pieces – which may not all have been developed in an Agile way. We saw a number of pointers in this latter vein.

You don’t have to attempt to scale the agile approach, as you are best served in some areas (such as the foundation APIs and critical services) to maintain a solid reliable and quality tested platform, but in other areas notably those which are closest to the business and the users.

I have not seen it successfully scale beyond 10 without starting to take more hybrid approaches (e.g. use Agile approaches for prototypes of key functionality and to mitigate largest risks. Use more traditional Prescriptive approaches for work to be outsourced to external development resources, ensure full test coverage, etc.)

Instead of having a 500 people project, create 10 projects of 20 people and a tree of say 1+4 integration projects each with 2 or 3 people each.

With all of this in mind, we’d be interested to understand better your own experiences. What’s your involvement been in Agile projects large or small, and how have you got on? We’ll collate your views and play them back to you at the end of the week.

Reader Poll