Agile development practices, while still controversial in some circles, offer undeniable benefits: faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements, and higher quality. However, agile practices have been defined and recommended primarily to small teams. In Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods can be applied to enterprise-class development.

Part I provides an overview of the most common and effective agile methods.

Part II describes seven best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level.

Part III describes an additional set of seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of software agility on an enterprise scale.

This presentation will be valuable to software developers, testers and QA personnel, managers and team leads, as well as to executives of software organizations whose objective is to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process but who are faced with all the challenges of developing software on an enterprise scale.

This presentation is based on Dean's new book by the same name recently published by Addison-Wesley. A few copies of the book will be raffled off at the meeting.

Comments about Scaling Software Agility:

"Companies have been implementing large agile projects for a number of years, but the 'stigma' of 'agile only works for small projects' continues to be a frequent barrier for newcomers and a rallying cry for agile critics. What has been missing from the agile literature is a solid, practical book on the specifics of developing large projects in an agile way. Dean Leffingwell's book Scaling Software Agility fills this gap admirably. It offers a practical guide to large project issues such as architecture, requirements development, multi-level release planning, and team organization. Leffingwell's book is a necessary guide for large projects and large organizations making the transition to agile development."

- Jim Highsmith, director, Agile Practice, Cutter Consortium, author of Agile Project Management

"There's tension between building software fast and delivering software that lasts, between being ultra-responsive to changes in the market and maintaining a degree of stability. In his latest work, Scaling Software Agility, Dean Leffingwell shows how to achieve a pragmatic balance among these forces. Leffingwell's observations of the problem, his advice on the solution, and his description of the resulting best practices come from experience: he's been there, done that, and has seen what's worked."

- Grady Booch, IBM Fellow

Dean Leffingwell's Presentation Download

PowerPoint Presentation

Dean Leffingwell is a renowned software development methodologist, author, and software team coach.

He is the former founder and CEO of Requisite, Inc., and a former vice president at Rational Software. During the last five years, Mr. Leffingwell has applied his experience as an independent consultant and advisor/methodologist to Rally Software and to the challenge of implementing agile methods at large distributed, multinational corporations.

Mr. Leffingwell is also the lead author of the popular text, Managing Software Requirements (Addison-Wesley, 2003).