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Guest View: Wrestling with scaling software agility

By Ryan Martens and Israel Gat

December 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 4)
Agile champions spend a lot of time trying to communicate the agile premise to the executives in their organization. The difference in context between the champion and the executive often makes it a difficult conversation. A Scrum Master versed in behavior-driven design is not always able to relate to the frustrations of a sales executive who gets free advice on how to sell from everyone and his grandmother.

Conversely, a CFO does not necessarily understand why unit test coverage on the company's legacy code is still inadequate after a full year of investment in agile methods that embrace refactoring as a core practice.

To bridge the chasm through this article, we resort to role-playing. Ryan Martens plays the Agile Champion; Israel Gat plays the Skeptical Executive. Metaphorically speaking, each one tries to wrestle the other to the ground.

A note of caution before Ryan and Israel make irreparable damage to their long-standing relationship: The two actually understand each other extremely well and rarely are they of different opinions on the fundamentals of agile in real life...

How do I to assess and mitigate the risks of adopting agile?

The Skeptical Executive Asks: Ryan, I liked the materials you sent me about the benefits of agile development. I am particularly impressed with the opportunity to apply agile practices in conjunction with Lean in my company. Having said that, I am not so comfortable yet that I have a good handle on the risks involved in large-scale agile deployment. I am not talking “only” about execution risk; I am talking about competitive risk, market risk, branding risk, monetary risk and so on. What would be your advice? How do I to assess these risks of adopting agile, and how do I mitigate them?

The Agile Champion Responds: Israel, let's start with a definition of risk from David Anderson's talk at the agile 2009 conference. He said, "Risk is the likelihood and magnitude of the difference between the desired outcome and the actual outcome."

Related Search Term(s): agile, professional development

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Comments

12/16/2009 10:31:39 PM EST

Extremely enjoyed reading this article. I wish that the executives would take about specific problems. Large backlog of required features to compete in rapidly changing market. Or probably customer churn. Generate more business from existing customers. Thanks, Sameh

CanadaSameh

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