Large-Scale Agile

Question 1

Compare and contrast small-scale vs large-scale agile?

Answer 1

Small Scale:
- Single Team
- Relatively few dependencies
- Product ownership confined to team
- Self-organization within team
- Software architecture work performed by team
- Continuous integration and testing by team

Large Scale:
- Multiple teams work on same end product
- Team interdependencies
- Product ownership shared amount multiple teams
- Self-organization for own work; increment planning for synchronization among teams
- Software architecture basis of team structure and backlogs
- Multi-team coordination and cooperation for continuous integration and testing

Question 2

What are the problems with scaling agile?

Answer 2

SoS - Scrum of scrums
Big Picture View - Portfolio & Program
Fails to let go the waterfall model
Governance & Authority start to fail

Question 3

What is the process of meetings in large scale scrum?

Answer 3

Sprint Planning Part 1: find out dependencies between product backlog items and discuss coordination

Sprint Planning Part 2: Done independently per team

Daily Scrum: Independently per team

Inter-team coordination meeting: Several times a week, often scrum masters may hold meeting to increase information sharing

Product Backlog Refinement: Mid-sprint meeting

Sprint Review: discuss overall feedback and alignment

Question 4

How can you scale the product owner?

Answer 4

Share responsibility and divide functionality

Create a hierarchy of product owners that each manage a portion

Question 5

How can someone proactively manage dependencies?

Answer 5

Use rolling lookahead planning: Only need to look ahead at the subsequent two sprints, use avg historical velocity with no consideration of tasks or hours, assume the hist. avg. velocity and the product owner has prioritized the product backlog

Share team members: effective when dependencies are difficult to identify in advance but not when they can occur among any number of teams

Question 6

How can you coordinate amongst agile teams?

Answer 6

• The Scrum of Scrum meetings
• Synchronizing Sprints: don’t need to end all on the same day, but slightly stagger so that someone could be at all the review meetings kinda thing
• Scaling the Sprint Planning Team

Question 7

What are some characteristics of communities?

Answer 7

• Self-organizing
• Can span projects
• Not a full-time job
• There’s often a “community coordinator”
• Typically 5-20hours/month