SV-ALN Meetup: Be Agile. Scale Up. Stay Lean.

Dean Leffingwell

If you are already familiar with the concepts of Agile methodology at the team level, following Dean Leffingwell when he elaborates on the scalability of the Agile framework is a breeze. Such was my experience yesterday when he presented the Scaled Agile Framework™ (SAF) at the SVALN meetup.

The primary ambition of the Scaled Agile Framework is to take the Agile principles to be effective at the enterprise level.

We have already seen several approaches to utilizing hierarchy in using the Agile methodology at the team level. This framework takes the hierarchy, from a team or a project level, to program and portfolio levels, and recognizes the need for non-functional requirements (NFRs), in addition to the user stories that a user would definitely interact with, and recognizes business epics and architectural epics.

On Managing [Complexity in] Systems Development

Modern society invariably tends to need complex¹ systems. (If a system is too 'simple', there may not be any market for it). Consider, for example, some of the successful products in present times:

1. Smartphones such as the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy
2. Tablets such as the iPad, Google Nexus 7
3. Electric cars such as the Tesla

Each one of the foregoing has, in addition to software, a collection of parts, in several levels of hierarchy, in creating the end user product. (A blog post makes an interesting observation that mature products tend to have not more than 4 levels of hierarchy in their bill of materials).