What is Scaling in Agile?
Agile is a set of values and principles. Agile is an umbrella term for a group of iterative product development frameworks. The Agile approaches such as Scrum framework, DSDM, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP) provide rules, practices, and guidelines to build products and solutions using the Agile values and principles.
Product development evolves through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers and end-users with these frameworks.
It encourages adaptive planning, exploratory development, fast delivery, and continuous improvement. Rapid and flexible response to change is at the heart of the system.
Most organizations started their Agile journey with one of the frameworks mentioned above, and Scrum is the most popular one. Scrum is lightweight and simple to understand.
Moreover, it provides some immutable principles guidelines. Therefore, it is suitable for small self-managed teams.
When more and more organizations and teams adopted Agile, it required scaling in a big way. The entire organization had to be in the process, not just a few self-managed teams.
Initially focusing strictly on empowering teams to develop products and solutions faster and more efficiently, the tremendous success in doing business this way led to large enterprise-level organizations scaling the practice to meet their needs, even extending beyond the product organization.
And with this, a lot of challenges emerged. As a result, organizations were looking for answers to navigate through the scaling challenges with:
- Alignment of all the teams towards a common goal
- Facilitate teams of teams planning
- Enable enterprise-wide visibility
- Coordination between teams and working together
- Cross-Team Dependencies
- Business
- Technical
- Common Architectural Guideline
- The cadence of development of multiple teams
- Synchronization of development
- Multiple sources of requirement
To view the full blog and this blog "What is Scaling in Agile?" is originally published on Agilemania website.
