SPA Conference session: Lessons Learned from Scaling XP

One-line description:Lessons learned from starting the first large-scale Extreme Programming project in the Israeli Air Force, and trying to scale it to multiple releases, teams and organizational levels.
 
Session format: Case study (75 mins) [read about the different session types]
 
Abstract:Although there are agile methodologies for all project sizes and types, most organizations start with one agile team, and grow according to its success. Managing this growth and adjusting the development process and its accompanying metrics is tricky: Many small teams have a preference to remain “small and agile”, thus limiting further productivity gains, and many other teams decide on dramatic changes which do not maintain agile principles. This tutorial is not a textbook solution, but rather a set of lessons learned from the first large-scale project based on Extreme Programming methodology in the Israeli Air Force. The focus of the tutorial is on scalability, from several perspectives: Over time (multiple releases), over size (growing from one to three teams, developing the same large product), and over managerial levels (how do we present the project to very different stakeholders?). The guidelines are based on a comprehensive dataset of quantitative and qualitative data, gather during development and used by the actual project teams to manage themselves. In addition to the evolution of the process and metrics, we’ll also present the reflection (learning) process used in the project, which is a highly valuable agile practice by itself, and a key to scaling any project.
 
Audience background:- Should have a good understanding of agile development practices. It’s helpful but not at all necessarily to have hands-on agile software development experience.
- Should have an understanding of and interest in peopleware.
 
Benefits of participating:- Learn valuable practices, guidelines and metrics which can be used to scale agile development projects over time, size and organizational levels.
- Learn a reflection process which can be used to stabilize a new development team as well as support continuous learning and process adjustment, required for growth.
- Gain a better understanding of the role of project metrics in software development.
 
Materials provided:Slides, which will include the lessons learned and the data on which they are based.
 
Process:Mainly taught, but with time allotted on each issue to encourage and enable participants to say how things are done in their organizations, and to discuss how the data and guidelines should be generalized to other projects.
It would be great if people bring up their own anecdotes, and I'll prepare a few questions in advance to encourage this. In any case, there's plenty of material to cover, so any level of interactivity the audience dictates can be easily adjusted for.
 
Detailed timetable:
 
Outputs:Summary of comments and suggestions by participants regarding the generalization and applicability of the proposed guidelines to other projects. This will be summarized and published online by me.
 
History:None in this exact format. However, some parts of this tutorial have been presented in the past in internal presentations, and presentations to specific partners in industry.
 
Presenters
1. David Talby
Amazon.com
2. 3.