This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

Lean Development and Agile Methods for Large-Scale Products: Key Thinking and Organizational Tools for Sustainable Competitive Success

Increasingly, large product-development organizations are turning to lean thinking, agile principles and practices, and large-scale Scrum to sustainably and quickly deliver value and innovation. However, many groups have floundered in their practice-oriented adoptions. Why? Because without a deeper understanding of the thinking tools and profound organizational redesign needed, it is as though casting seeds on to an infertile field. Now, drawing on their long experience leading and guiding large-scale lean and agile adoptions for large, multisite, and offshore product development, and drawing on the best research for great team-based agile organizations, internationally recognized consultant and best-selling author Craig Larman and former leader of the agile transformation at Nokia Networks Bas Vodde share the key thinking and organizational tools needed to plant the seeds of product development success in a fertile lean and agile enterprise.

Coverage includes  

• Lean thinking and development combined with agile practices and methods

• Systems thinking

• Queuing theory and large-scale development processes

• Moving from single-function and component teams to stable cross-functional cross-component Scrum feature teams with end-to-end responsibility for features

• Organizational redesign to a lean and agile enterprise that delivers value fast

• Large-scale Scrum for multi-hundred-person product groups

In a competitive environment that demands ever-faster cycle times and greater innovation, applied lean thinking and agile principles are becoming an urgent priority. Scaling Lean & Agile Development will help leaders create the foundation for their lean enterprise–and deliver on the significant benefits of agility.

In addition to the foundation tools in this text, see the companion book Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum for complementary action tools.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 14 Ratings

good feature team analysis - poor component team analysis - 2009-09-16
Reviewer Rating:
It misses many of the positives of componentizations, how beneficial managing expert talent in your organization can be ultimately and various other ways the problems of component-centric organizations can be mitigated without having to incur the costs of pure a pure feature team structure.

However, I found their explanation of FT excellent with good supporting case studies.

Half of the Book - 2009-06-02
Reviewer Rating:
This book contains a significant amount of useful information. I liked the idea of providing those ideas in the form of things to try, experiments. See what works for you in your context. Doesn't work? Try something else. There are also a number of things that have been tried and found to not be useful.

So why the so-so rating? It's only half the story that's being told. To often in the text we find the phrase "Explored in the companion book" or "Tips are found in the companion text". Seeing this my peers and superiors just dismissed the whole effort as incomplete. They now have gone looking for other sources. Six months on from publication and still no indication of when the rest of the story gets told.

Which is too bad. I think they've got a lot of it right.

Clear and effective - 2009-08-20
Reviewer Rating:
This book is great at illustrating just how complementary lean and agile practices are. It's particularly effective at re-iterating how to make use of lean and agile thinking...if you read this book you will remember it's key messages. Whilst the sub-title talks to large-scale organisations, this book is applicable to agile at any scale.

I loved it and openly recommend it to all.

Great tools for those adopting agile on large teams - 2009-06-05
Reviewer Rating:
While supposedly on vacation and sitting on a beach in Jamaica I finally got around to reading a couple of books that haven't quite made it to the top of the stack. This is largely thanks to the lack of slack and impending annual performance reviews. More on that later...

In the meantime what of Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum?

It turns out this wasn't quite what I was expecting. Which, in this case, is a good thing. Much of the nuts and bolts of large-scale development will be covered in an--as yet unpublished--companion volume; "Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum".

Why is this a good thing? Well, the second volume will focus on the nuts and bolts and the temptation would for many potential readers--myself included--to skip the theory and go straight to the applied. A bad idea when the central theme of the first volume is that large-scale agile adoption has effects throughout the organization. The development team and day-to-day development activities are just the tip of the iceberg.

The first section of the book focuses on thinking tools; Systems Thinking, Lean Thinking, Queueing Theory. Which is typical of the book's approach of giving the readers the tools to "Be agile rather than do agile". This makes a lot of sense. Large organizations are complex and unique, attempting to author a one size fits all recipe for agile adoption would seem unwise. But if you're expecting a book containing a prescriptive set of recipes then you'll be disappointed.

The second section covers the organizational tools starting off with Feature Teams and the inherent problems with component teams. The discussion expands to cover many other topics; building teams in place of managing resource pools, rewarding teams as opposed to individuals, a Beyond Budgets approach rather than a conventional annual budgeting approach. All these come into play when managing large scale organizational change to a more agile approach.

It's only in the last chapter that the authors put it all together and discuss two example Scrum Frameworks for large organizations. They also go to great lengths not to be prescriptive with "Try..." and "Avoid..." sections replacing "Do..." and "Don't...". Much of the details will be covered in the companion book.

There's a lot of material presented here and it leaves the reader with the somewhat daunting task of figuring out how to turn their organization inside out. Especially when considering something the size of Microsoft's Developer Division (of which p&p is part). There are some possible reasons for this:

There's an inflection point at some size/complexity scale where this approach breaks down.
Visual Studio's huge legacy, architecture, code base and long established engineering culture needs more change than I can imagine in order to map it onto the full Feature Team approach they describe (I'm not very imaginative).
The road from were we are today and the approach Bas and Craig describe is longer than I'm prepared to accept.
In some respects much of what we tried to do in Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 maps onto their Product, Product Area and Feature Teams approach and we had moderate successes. I'll be giving my well-thumbed to various people in the Division's engineering team and see what they think. It's full of good ideas and definitely worth reading I'm waiting for volume 2.

Read more about distributed and large scale agile on my blog: [...]

A software engineering guide perfect for libraries strong in agile software concepts - 2009-05-11
Reviewer Rating:
Lean thinking and development projects blend with agile practices and systems thinking in "Scaling Lean & Agile Development", a definitive and thoroughly 'user friendly' guide to organizational re-design moving from single-function teams to cross-functional teams. Leaders will learn the basics of agility in a software engineering guide perfect for libraries strong in agile software concepts.

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