Agile Scalability is essentially of Being Agile, not just Doing Agile.
From techopedia: Scalable agile is an agile software
development process that refers to the ability to manage large projects with
multiple teams. Based on its conceptual framework, agile software development
is often considered to not be scalable and only intended for small projects and
teams. Thus, Agile's scalability is a heated and debated subject. Many believe
that agile development cannot be sustained when a project is large or multiple
teams are involved. The flipside is that many open-source projects could be
considered loosely agile given the iterative nature. So what are further
perspectives upon Agile scalability?
The agile processes
are scalable when they take into account architectural changes. In other
words, the project team cannot make decisions in isolation but has to take into
consideration the concerns of other organizational units. But it is also
paradoxical: On the one hand the agile methodology says: you need to be agile,
it should be possible to change everything to fit the customer needs. On the
other hand architecture says: Architecture is about everything costly to
change. It does not say agile and architecture is not compatible at all; it
does mean that the large development organization should not focus on agile
techniques, but on the system architecture and the teams may use what ever is
reasonable and applicable for them.
It takes systematic
way to find out which decisions have the most impact in a particular business
domain and addresses the scalability cohesively. Business goals, core
requirements/constraints, the architecture - all of them have the same nature -
it's about human decisions. And the trick is to find minimal number with the
biggest impact and to make these decisions first (it becomes the vision, the
guidelines, basis for the organization structure etc.), and that challenge is
what makes companies successful, or not. The huge rest of decision may be and
should be made later.That means agile scalability is not just about doing Agile at large scope, but about being agile at the heart of organization.
When it comes to
agile projects at scale, metrics are there to provide insight as well as
visibility. They are there to help gauge whether the team is in trouble,
the products being generated are of sufficient quality for release, the process
is working and, most importantly, the team is on track and that value will be
delivered to the user or customer who should be, but often isn't fully engaged
in the development. The metrics can be of three kinds (at least) -
project, quality, business value
The even larger issue
is effective governance. You can gather the best measures in the world, but
if the people looking at them don't understand the implications of what they're
looking at and then act appropriately, you have a serious problem. There are
plenty of metrics, that people misunderstand and misuse them and that proven
metrics frameworks provide lots of insight. An effective governance
framework, process and metric can ensure agile scalability sustainable and
measurable, and to track and gain visibility into progress at the project and
enterprise levels.
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