from The Rational Edge: An excerpted chapter from the recent book, Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, by former Rational Software VP Dean Leffingwell. This book is described by Jim Highsmith as "a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way."
Title: Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises
Author: Dean Leffingwell
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN 0-321-45819-2
Copyright 2007 by Addison-Wesley.
"Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the 'stigma' of 'agile only works for small projects' continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell's book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell's book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development."
"There's tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell's observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he's been there, done that, and has seen what's worked."
-Grady Booch, IBM Fellow
Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development.
Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods.
Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level.
Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale.
This book is invaluable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.
This chapter is excerpted from "Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises", authored by Dean Leffingwell, published by Addison-Wesley Professional in February, 2007, as part of The Agile Software Development Series, edited by Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith. Copyright 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. ISBN 0321458192. For more information, please visit: www.awprofessional.com/title/0321458192
Title: Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises
