Communications of the ACM

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