Scaling Agile: Is it The Next Big Thing?
“What’s the next big thing in Agile?” is a question I’ve been asked a lot over the years. Answering used to make me a feel a little awkward. It was almost as though the questioner is treating Agile as a fashion, one that includes many fads. My usual answer has been, “Whatever your team decides to make it” reflecting my deeply-held conviction that Agile in general, and Scrum in particular, is fundamentally about self-managing teams. More recently though the tone of the question has been different, and has reflected the fact that there are people now with real track records in applying Agile approaches to software development, and they have a real thirst for more learning. So, when the question was asked of me for the umpteenth time recently, I found myself answering “The next big thing is scaling Agile”.
What Does It Mean to Scale Agile?
Scaling Agile usually involves two things: developing products that require more resources than one small development team can supply, and making organizational changes to accommodate the approach. Let’s be clear, Scrum and eXtreme Programming (XP) both started with enterprise applications. There have always been big projects that have used Agile, albeit a small minority of them, but now the software development community has reached a stage – or at least is rapidly approaching it- when the use of Agile for big projects will be the norm.
Read more at http://blog.learningtree.com/uk/scaling-agile-the-next-big-thing/
