State0 Blog

Walter Bodwell is a local venture laborist. He has been doing agile development for a long time. Now he has an agile consulting company called Planigle. I heard him speak a couple of days ago at an Agile Austin event. He talked mostly about taking BMC from Waterfall to Agile development. It was the first time I had heard much about large companies doing agile development. In general, the terms “big” and “agile” seem to be at odds with each other. After listening to Walter for an hour or so, I can almost say them both in the same sentence.  Here are some of the points about scaling agile that I thought were noteworthy:

1. First get management to start thinking in terms of priority lists instead of requirements docs
2. Work hard to get a common build running every night
3. When the common build breaks, make it highest priority to fix it
4. Stay releasable
5. Do not use velocity or other metrics to incentivise or compare: it will cause inflated metrics and competition over collaboration
6. Architect just what you need for this iteration and maybe the next
7. Get your sales team to talk value not features
8. Do not commit to anything in the second half of the release plan
9. Do not accept anything that breaks something else
10. Stay honest technically by refactoring when you see need
11. When outsourcing, hire like you do here and hire full teams
12. No “scrum butts” - meet every day
13. Date based releases work well - when time is up, ship

A general theme that I picked up on was Team collaboration over compensation competition. This seems to be the internal version of “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation“.