Measuring Agile in the Enterprise: 5 Success Factors for Large-Scale Agile Adoption
BMC is a global provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to automate and align IT with the needs of the business. It also has one of the largest deployments of distributed Agile development with 95 people on 7 teams spread across 4 locations.
In a landmark study, BMC opened its doors to allow QSM Associates, a consultancy for software development measurement, estimation, and planning (www.qsma.com), to evaluate its Agile deployment and measure/quantify the benefits of agility. The QSM Associates’ study concluded that:
- BMC’s time-to-market was in the 90th+ percentile. Specifically, its build iterations phase was just 4 to 5 months as compared to more than one year for the rest of the industry.
- BMC scaled Agile to a very large team - 7 SCRUM teams distributed across 4 locations, to speed time-to-market.
- Despite this, defects were lower than industry. [In contrast, waterfall projects typically experience 400%+ defects.]
This study assessed two major BMC releases with schedules ranging from four and a half to five months, 90 – 95 full-time employees delivering approximately 1,450 story cards, comprised of about 1.4 million lines of new and modified code. Both teams use Agile/Scrum practices they put in place at BMC in 2005, as well as coaching and tools from Rally.
The good news is that any team with the right motivation, training and tools can implement Agile and scale it to these levels. The less good news is that there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach to Agile adoption. This presentation will present, in detail, the complete findings of the QSM Associates’ study as well as outline 5 critical factors for success with large-scale Agile adoption based on BMC’s three-year Agile rollout to its entire development organization.
Outline: - Complete Survey Findings - The 5 Success Factors of Large-Scale Agile - Buy-In - Ready to Ship - Dusk to Dawn Teamwork - The Backlog - Holding Back the Waterfall - Q&A
Keynote address. Michael Mah is Cutter Consortium’s Benchmarking Practice Director and a Managing Partner at QSM Associates. He is a well-known, dynamic and highly-rated speaker in the world of software development, providing keynotes, track sessions & workshops at events like Better Software (in June, ‘06 and also keynoting this June ‘08), SEPG, SPIN chapters, SD Best Practices, SPI Ireland and Agile Development Practices 2007.
Michael uses a combination of his many years’ experience collecting and analyzing real world data along with a provocative and informative presentation of “what the numbers say,” the “story” behind productivity levels and the implications for Agile development looking toward the future.