A few months back I wrote about the challenges facing agile adoption in the enterprise. I got a lot of requests to outline some tips to overcome some of these challenges, which I have addressed in a follow-up post on AgileScout. The key points are:
- Get management buy-in.
- Plan for entire releases, not just one sprint.
- Plan sprints with specialized/shared resources in mind.
- Complex inter-dependencies are a reality – deal with it!
- Keep reasonable sprint lengths – at 3 or 4 weeks.
- Don’t expect all sprint deliverables to be production ready.
- Define “done” consistently across the teams.
- Reserve at least two “hardening” sprints.
- Be pragmatic about usable design documentation.
- Adopt continuous integration principles.
Agile Development Methodology
Read the entire article here.
UPDATE: To clarify, the tips above specifically address the challenges put forth in the earlier post around enterprise application integration projects. For other enterprise projects, vanilla Scrum approach may work fine.
Musings of an Enterprise Software Technologist 