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Zeichick’s Take: Thinking big—as in big projects


By Alan Zeichick
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August 2, 2010 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Perhaps last week’s column about mainframes put the thought into my head, but it occurs to me: We talk so much about agile processes, which are clearly well-suited to small and mid-sized projects. But what about scaling agile for big projects? This is a topic that’s often debated, but in my opinion at least, hasn’t been completely settled.

By big projects, I don’t mean the workload of the deployed application (i.e., lots of transactions per second), or even of the importance of the deployed application (i.e., a business-critical application). I mean the size and complexity of the application.

Think about a software development project that has, oh, 10 million source lines of C#, C++ or Java code, or maybe more than 300,000 function points. Or maybe 5x or 10x that size.

We’re talking about large software teams, complex requirements and a significant cost. It’s not a happy little Web application that’s being thrown together with a couple of dozen people and rolling out next month; it’s going to take a while, and it’s going to be expensive.

Many large projects use a heavyweight process like the Rational Unified Process. But can they be agile too? Can you successfully combine the flexibility of Extreme Programming with a requirements-first RUP project? RUP already specifies iterative development, but how much of Scrum can scale up large? Is the answer to use Kanban? Or to say bye-bye, agile?

When discussing this question with SD Times columnists Andrew Binstock and Larry O’Brien, Larry said that, when it comes to the problem of scaling agility for large projects, “It's not the methodology, but the management. An aligned, self-correcting team is far more likely in a smaller business where there's an investment and personal relationship from the low to the high. Is a Scrum standup going to be successful for a team assigned to execute a doubtful policy about which they can give no meaningful criticism?”

Now, consider how agile plays out when launching a large project. As Andrew Binstock suggested, some questions are:


Related Search Term(s): agile, mainframes

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Comments


08/05/2010 05:52:19 PM EST

Here's a few examples to try Air Traffic Control, NYSE, or Ballistic Missile Defense. These are big problems where mistakes are costly and therefore the users are very cautious.

United StatesDan Byrne


08/15/2010 12:46:00 PM EST

In my architecture experience at LimeLeap, I've found Agile to be very good at building systems that can become fairly large in scale, so long as we're building the first version of them. Weaving modularity into version 1.0 is an easy design decision to make, and greatly facilitates Agile methodologies. A significant limitation we've encountered though is when a new system is replacing an old large one with highly integrated components. Bringing replacement modules online one at a time sometimes isn't feasible due to legacy integration constraints, requiring one large development run to replace the older system in its entirety all at once. Anyone else applying Agile to the "large system replacement" scenario?

United StatesPaul Katz


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