agility at scale: platform versus product concerns - agile pune 2014

A common failure mode for organizations attempting to adopt an Agile style of software development occurs when an attempt is made to “Scale Agile”. Suddenly, the organization finds that there are scheduling problems between teams. Delivery team members suddenly find that they are required to serve on several teams at once. Dependencies surface, and teams find it difficult to come together in a common cadence to produce working software in a continuously delivered fashion. Many times, these issues become so grave that the organization reverts back to the Waterfall model that they came to hate, but at least understood. This session explores Agile scaling concerns, and places particular emphasis on an architecturally significant distinction in the software to be created, and the components produced to allow the software to be created. That distinction revolves around cross cutting platform concerns versus product feature creation concerns. We will examine the distinctions and explore solutions that should help your organization get past these issues when it comes to portfolio management, by paying attention to extrinsic versus intrinsic value metrics.