Back Cover text:
“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.”
—Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management
“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.
Dean Leffingwell is a renowned software development methodologist, author, and software team coach. He is
the former founder and CEO of Requisite, Inc., and a former vice president at Rational Software. During the
last five years, Mr. Leffingwell has applied his experience as an independent consultant and
advisor/methodologist to Rally Software and to the challenge of implementing agile methods at large
distributed, multinational corporations. Mr. Leffingwell
is also the lead author of the popular text, Managing Software Requirements (Addison-Wesley, 2003).
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
About the Author
Part I Overview of Software Agility
1. Introduction to Agile Methods
2. Why The Waterfall Model Doesn’t Work
3. The Essence of XP
4. The Essence of SCRUM
5. The Essence of RUP
6. Lean Software, DSDM, and FDD
7. The Essence of Agile
8. The Challenge of Scaling Agile
Part II Seven Agile Team Practices that Scale
9. The Define/Build/Test Component Team
10. Two Levels of Planning and Tracking
11. Mastering the Iteration
12. Smaller, More Frequent Releases
13. Concurrent Testing
14. Continuous Integration
15. Regular Reflection and Adaptation
Part III Creating the Agile Enterprise
16. Intentional Architecture
17. Lean Requirements at Scale: Vision, Roadmap and
Just-In-Time Elaboration
18. Systems of Systems and The Agile Release Train
19. Managing Highly Distributed Development
20. Changing the Organization
21. Impact on Customers and Operations
22. Measuring Business Performance
Bibliography
Index
