REVIEW: Scaling Lean and Agile Development

A very interesting, vivid and beneficial presentation!

The purpose of the presentation is to illustrate “how” to scale lean and Agile across multisite. It presents practices and tips related to adoption of offshore, multisite development and coordination within large scrum teams.

I liked that fact that was presented at the beginning: “big projects” can be broken down to smaller projects. Large project are most of the time based on wrong assumptions. So before thinking of scaling think of breaking down the project into smaller projects.

The presentation covers all the challenges related to scaling agile development and how to address them. It also covers a lot of very interesting and realistic practices including: “Diverse/Merge design cycles”, “Cross Component teams”, “Area Product Manager”, “Area backlog”, “Cross Pollination”, “Joint Design workshops” and CoP (Community of Practice).

Craig also presented a lot of tools that can be used to facilitate the scaling experience including large whiteboards, open source tools, and conferencing applications. Craig stress that any tool used should be ubiquitous and cheap.

All challenges were discussed in the context of: Tasks, Structure, Process, Rewards and People. As the beginning, Craig ended the presentation very nicely.

I believe this presentation is one of the most interesting and informative presentation I have ever seen. I highly recommend watching it.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Large-Multisite-or-Offshore-Delivery

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