IN HIS PAPER entitled “Industrial Scale Agile,”
9 Roly
Stimson characterizes industrial-scale agile as:
˲ “Agile at any scale.”
˲ “Agile as the rule, not the exception.”
˲ “Agile sustainably, forever,” not just as an
unrepeatable “one-off.”
This means being able to sustainably apply agile strategies appropriately to anything and everything that can
benefit from them. This includes:
˲ Being able to do “agile at scale” as
and when appropriate.
˲Doing small-scale agile as and
when possible/appropriate.
˲Evolving the entire application
landscape and not just individual applications.
Although it is important, and a necessary precursor to industrial-scale
agile, scaling agile is not the challenge
here. Rather, it’s about how to achieve
sustainability of the following:
˲ The way of working in the face of
ever-changing teams.
˲ The systems in the face of rapid
change.
˲ The application landscape as a
whole.
˲ Individuals and their careers, and
the development organization as a
whole.
˲ Long-term investment in IT.
There are many ways to illustrate
how fragile IT investments can be. You
just have to look at the way that, even
after huge investments in education
and coaching, many organizations
are struggling to broaden their agile
adoption to the whole of their organization—or at the way other organizations are struggling to maintain the
momentum of their agile adoptions as
Industrial-
Scale Agile—
From Craft to
Engineering
DOI: 10.1145/3009830
Article development led by
queue.acm.org
Essence is instrumental in moving
software development toward
a true engineering discipline.
BY IVAR JACOBSON, IAN SPENCE, AND ED SEIDEWITZ