That feeling of a great XP team. A cross-functional team, all in a room, getting shi…pping done. Everybody working together, sharing responsibility, creating great code. It’s impossible to forget.
But what do you do when the startup IPOs, and the 12-person company is now a 1000-person behemoth? What do you do when the XP team grows, and you have 100 people working on a product, not ten? How do you keep those great small-team dynamics in a big organization?
When people talk about scaling Agile, they focus on what’s palatable to the “enterprise:” how to make Agile safe, non-threatening, and acceptable. But what if we aren’t in that kind of company? What if we know what it’s like to be great, but we’re too big to do it the way we used to?
Let’s set aside the brand names, consulting companies, and enterprise certifications. Let’s look at the possibilities of large-scale Agile at its best.
James Shore