Dean Leffingwell eases you into scaling agile in a very comfortable way – first through reviewing many of the existing methods, then through showing how many of the common practices you are implementing today actually scale, and finally through recognizing the key differences and approaches required in scaling agile to a large enterprise. His many years experience in agile (and more importantly non-agile) environments come through in the way he walks you through his discovery of this scalable agile approach.
Dean also doesn’t hold back any punches in his critique of agile practices and what is needed, or needs to be changed, to scale them. He is quite direct in his opposition to XP’s emergent architectural approach and its inability to scale – rather he introduces Intentional Architecture. Is it too prescriptive to be agile? If you are an enterprise architecture developing systems of systems, you might not think so. Dean provides some excellent ideas to help balance architectural discovery and planning to keep your runway long and clear.
Dean is perhaps best known for his work in Requirements Management. In this book he visits each of the agile, iterative and lean requirements approaches to explain how a balanced, just-in-time approach provides the right mix to scale. I find that this is often the biggest change to most enterprise organizations that tend to write verbose specifications and have the most concerns about project scope and governance. Dean provides a clear picture of how to manage requirements efficiently.
While each of the chapters in the later half of this book could fill an entire book itself, Dean does an excellent job in presenting the critical elements of each and just enough to help get you going down the right path. Yet I would have preferred to see more depth in organizational structures which influence agile scalability – an area that I find particularly troublesome for most large companies. However, as Dean said in describing his book, “If this book were any thicker, it wouldn’t be agile.”