Scott Ambler

Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott Ambler — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:00:00 GMT

On April 25, 2013 I gave a webcast for the Global Rational User Community entitled Disciplined Agile Delivery: Going beyond Scrum . During the webcast a large number of questions were asked but unfortunately I couldn’t get to all of them. So I’ve taken the opportunity to write up the answers in this blog posting.

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Webcast - Agile in a regulatory environment

Scott Ambler — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:42:41 GMT

On Nov 16 2011, Kim Werner, Agile Coach from ATSC and Liz Parnell, Solution Design Manager from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC), gave a webcast sharing their experiences regarding how BCBSNC adopted a few Agile techniques, with the help of some good coaching, and adopted some IBM Rational Jazz tools (Rational Team Concert and Rational Requirements Composer) to reduce time to market and lower development costs. BCBCNC works in the highly-regulated healthcare industry, so faced a few interesting constraints when adopting agile.

Agile Adoption Within IBM Software Group (SWG)

Scott Ambler — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:38:24 GMT

Recently Gina Poole blogged about IBM saved $300 million by going agile. That's not too bad when you think about it.

A few days later someone asked a series of questions that I thought would make an interesting blog posting, so here goes:

How much of IBM's projects (in percentage) are agile at the moment?
I don’t have exact numbers, but I believe that 90%+ of our teams in SWG are applying agile techniques in practical ways that make sense for their projects. The primary goal is to be effective – in frequent releases, higher quality, and happy customers – not just agile. By the way, there is roughly 30,000 developers in SWG.

Can all of IBM's projects work with an agile methodology?
It’s certainly possible, but it may not always make sense. Products that are in maintenance mode with few bugs or feature requirements may not benefit as much from agile practices -- those teams will likely continue to do whatever it is that they have been doing. Having said that, it's still highly desirable to apply agile techniques on maintenance projects.
Also, agile methods can be harder to use on some projects than others, for example, around hardware development. As a general rule, I believe that the majority of software projects can benefit from agile techniques. The primary determinant of whether a team can adopt agile techniques is culture and skill – not team size, the domain, or the degree of geographic distribution. That notion surprises many people who think that large agile teams or geographically distributed agile teams can’t succeed in adopting agile practices.

Are agile projects sub-parts of large waterfall projects?
In some cases, that may happen. I’m sure it’s also true in reverse. We see many customers who are migrating from waterfall projects to a more agile way of doing things, and they often start this migration with smaller sub-projects. At IBM, we have tens of thousands of developers worldwide on hundreds of teams, so we have examples of pretty much any combination of agile, iterative, and traditional practices that you can imagine. There’s definitely not one size that fits all, which is a key aspect of the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework.

What do you think the impact of these numbers will be on the PM community?
The IBM PM community is embracing agile. And the reality is that a majority of development organizations around the world are moving to agile now as well (as much as 80% in some of the recent studies I’ve seen). I look forward to the increased adoption of agile methods by the PM community in general. The fact that PMI now offers an Agile Certified Practitioner training program certainly underscores the fact that agile practices are being adopted widely in the mainstream which is a great thing to see.

Agile Adoption Success Factors

Scott Ambler — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:28:16 GMT

In November 2011 Paul Gorans, the Accelerated Solution Delivery (ASD) practice lead in IBM GBS, and I ran an agile adoption survey

. The survey explored a range of issue, including the factors that appear to be associated with the success and failure of agile project teams. Paul wrote up his thoughts in his Agile State of the Art Survey article on ibm.com and I did the same for Dr Dobb's Journal in Agile Success Factors. This blog posting summarizes the results of the survey.

Factors which appear to accelerate agile adoption include:

People are assigned to a single team

Development teams have easy access to business expertise

Development teams are organized for agile delivery (not traditional)

Your organization has an agile support group/community of excellence

Your organization is explicitly addressing barriers to agility

There is executive sponsorship for agile

Agile teams are measured on value creation

Your organization's IT governance strategy includes an agile path

Factors which appear to decelerate agile adoption include:

Agile teams are measured using traditional metrics

The survey also explored whether organizations were succeeding at large team agile and geographically distributed agile teams (yes, they are).