Hello and Welcome to Dean Leffingwell's Website

This website is intended for use primarily by my business associates, as well as others interested in the topics of
enterprise-scale agile software development methods, software development agility practices in general, software
product management and software requirements management.


Please note: I'm not doing much maintenance here anymore, as most all of my recent work is in Scaling Software
Agility. To see the latest in my thinking on that  topic, visit the
blog dedicated to that purpose.
- Dean


.
More on the book
Publications:

Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises
Based on my experiences of the last few years in coaching larger teams in their adoption of agile methods, I've
written a new book which has just been published (March 2007) by Addison-Wesley. The title is
Scaling Software
Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises
and it is available on line and at technical bookstores nationwide. Here’s
how the book is described:

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.

Click here to learn more about Scaling Software Agility.


Managing Software Requirements, Second Edition: A Use Case Approach
The second edition of our book, Managing Software Requirements: A Use Case Approach, by Dean Leffingwell and
Don Widrig,  was  published in 2003. This edition has approximately 30% new content with significant new focus on
use cases, product management, and application of requirements management in the context of iterative and agile
software development processes Agile and iterative methods such as Extreme Programming and the Rational
Unified Process.



Some Interesting New Software Companies:

I continue to focus on helping software teams meet their goals. Presently, I serve as advisor/director to the following
new (and extremely agile!) software businesses:

Ping Identity Corporation creates software and services that make federated identity work in a simple and
scalable way. Ping’s products and services provide enterprises with complete standards-based (SAML, Liberty
Alliance and WS-Federation) solutions for federated identity. Ping Identity is the only company focused exclusively
on identity federation, open standards and making it simple. Ping Identity is also the sponsor of SourceID (www.
sourceid.org), the leading open source community focused on federation protocols and standards.
 
visit www.pingidentity.com

Rally Software Development Corporation provides an agile Software Product Development Management
Environment that gives distributed software teams the development and management platform necessary to meet
the demanding discipline of iterative and agile development. Rally’s environment helps software teams define,
manage, test and release software products that customers want to buy.
visit www.rallydev.com
The Flatirons in Winter
Boulder, Colorado
Update -
Over the last two years, I've been writing a book on achieving enterprise-level software agility.  I did so in the hope
that what I and others have learned in applying the principles and practices of software agility at enterprise scale
would benefit the software industry as a whole. Even more importantly, I hope to help all software practitioners–
developers, testers
, team leads, project managers and executives alike– achieve higher productivity and greater
personal satisfaction in their every day working lives as they struggle daily to deliver quality software much more
rapidly to the marketplace.

I’m happy to announce that the finished product:
Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises,
is now available on line and in mainstream bookstores throughout the US. For more information on the book, and
for evolving discussions of ongoing learnings in enterprise agility visit the
SSA Blog: Scaling Software Agility: Best
Practices for Larger Enterprises
.
Visit the SSA Blog