Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale (Part I of II )

the roadblocks and impediments that prevent them from continuously improving their productivity. Since this process is not prescriptive, it can give some discomfort to project management organizations, process organizations executives and the like, who tend towards documented, prescriptive and mandated processes. And yet, the reality is that these empowered teams will indeed improve their practices so long as management encourages this basic behavior and does not stand in the way.

Taken together these seven agile team practices that scale can be applied at most any enterprise-level.  As we've said, we do not minimize the undertaking or suggest that there easy to adopt and apply; but rather that any enterprise that seriously addresses agility will be able to accomplish these practices to some degree and their localized component and feature teams will operate with higher degrees of productivity and quality.

Coming in Part II - Seven Agile Enterprise Practices
We have also come to understand that these practices alone do not fully address all the issues that must be addressed to achieve software agility at enterprise scale.  To create the agile enterprise requires additional work. Part II of this article will discuss seven agile enterprise practices that complement these agile team practices.

Taken together, the seven agile team practices that scale and the seven agile enterprise practices that can be mastered over time will substantially improve the performance of the software enterprise.  While the undertaking is significant, the rewards are significant as well, and the benefits of higher productivity, improved time-to-market, higher-quality and lower support costs, coupled with the benefit of unleashing the creative and productive power of empowered project teams, will launch the company toward it's goal of a creating the agile enterprise.

About the Author

Dean Leffingwell is a software industry executive, entrepreneur, and part time methodologist/author who has spent his career trying to help software teams achieve their goals. He is the former founder and CEO of Requisite, Inc. makers of RequisitePro, and a former SVP at Rational Software. He now serves as a consulting methodologist to Rally Software and as advisor to a number of larger software enterprises. He is the lead author of the text: "Managing Software Requirements: A use Case Approach", Addison Wesley, 2003. This article is excerpted from his next book entitled; "Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for the Enterprise", scheduled for publication in fall of 2006 from Addison Wesley.