As agile practices and technologies become more and more popular, agile frameworks and technologies for large organizations in enterprises are gradually being valued. Agile frameworks such as SCRUM for teams are generally suitable for small organizations of 5-9 people, but many agile suggestions for SCRUM are not suitable for large organizations. Therefore, this article introduces common large-scale agile frameworks suitable for enterprises.
Scrum of Scrums agile framework
Scrum is the most popular agile framework, used by agile teams of 5-9 people. In general, many large-scale agile frameworks are based on Scrum. When your team is relatively large, for example, more than 10 people, the first measure to implement agile practice is to break the team into multiple small 5-9 people. team.
When multiple Scrum teams work together, how to coordinate the work of each team? The Scrum Alliance gave a plan: Scrum of Scrums.
When there are multiple Scrum teams, each Scrum team has a Scrum Master, or agile coach. The agile coach then forms a Scrum team to coordinate the work of each Scrum team.
Scrum of Scrums model
The coordination of agile teams requires some processes to track each other's dependencies, integration work, work plans, test work and others. However, these processes did not give a plan in Scrum. In Scrum, only the requirements are put into the product list according to priority, but there is no how to collect requirements, how to code implementation, how to test and how to deploy.
Although Scrum does not give management solutions for large projects, there are many books that give solutions. Many teams have introduced Extreme Programming (XP), Test Driven Development (TDD), and pair programming to implement coding. There are also many companies that use DevOps practices for automated building and continuous integration. In addition, some teams use some of their own methods to manage the Scrum team together with the Scrum of Scrums framework.
The LeSS agile framework
LeSS stands for Large-Scale Scrum. It uses the basic guidelines of Scrum, and adopts some other methods to manage large-scale agile projects. LeSS recommends that each agile team be composed of 8 teams, and then multiple agile teams form a large agile project.
The LeSS agile framework uses a product list, a product owner, and a DOD (definition of done) method to manage the sprint output deliverable product increment. LeSS uses the short-term sprint recommended by Scrum. All agile teams have the same sprint, and each team cooperates to complete this sprint.
In LeSS, there are two sprint planning meetings at the beginning of the sprint. In the first sprint planning meeting, each team sends people to participate in the discussion and management of mutual dependence and collaboration. The second sprint is the sprint of the Scrum agile team. At the end of the sprint, there were two retrospectives, one for the internal agile team and one for the entire large agile project.
In addition, LeSS introduced an area product owner (APO) to manage user needs across teams.
LeSS Agile Framework Organization
SAFe® The large-scale agile framework
SAFe®, the Scaled Agile Framework®, is currently one of the fastest growing agile frameworks. It introduces many new roles, components, and events at the team, program, value stream, and portfolio levels.
SAFe 4.6 version
In team-level SAFe, this framework uses Scrum and Kanban, and the sprint uses an iteration cycle of 2 weeks. The list of user stories for team work comes from the product list of the program.
At the project level, 10-12 weeks are used as a release train (ART). The release train consists of multiple sprints, and this series of sprints releases one or more product increments (PI). The last sprint in this series of sprints is called the IP sprint. Each team can create more new requirements, review the PI that has just ended, and plan for the future PI.
The value stream layer is composed of multiple ARTs, and multiple roles, components, and events are used to help the team coordinate and integrate each ART.
The product portfolio layer analyzes epic demand from the perspective of value flow. Epic can be decomposed into capability layers, product features, user stories, etc. from the perspective of value flow, and then the user stories are implemented by the agile team.
Trained agile delivery (DAD)
Trained agile delivery (DAD) is based on agile and lean principles and includes personnel, value-based solutions, incremental delivery, and continuous learning methods.
The difference between DAD and other agile frameworks is that it is a process solution. The main feature of other frameworks is to provide a series of guiding principles. DAD helps the team form an already agile and process solution.
Trained agile delivery 2.0
DAD consists of three process stages: concept formation, construction and delivery. Compared with other large-scale agile frameworks, DAD provides more architecture and design guidance in the concept and delivery practice stages.
Vision drive delivery (VDD)
vision driven delivery (VDD) stands for Vision Driven Delivery. This large-scale agile framework includes customer agile exploration methods, business model analysis, agile software product development and delivery, enterprise software delivery lifecycle management, processes and guidelines. Its purpose is to enable enterprises to truly deliver the required software products to users or markets quickly, and to help companies reduce the unknown market risks they face in the entrepreneurial phase or the launch of new products.
