大规模敏捷三十六计（英文版）

Large-Scale Agile 36 Strategies

Change Management of Large-Scale Agile Transformations

1. Establish Agile Transformation Committee to lead Agile change systematically.

2. Form large-scale agile teams around the lines of business or product lines of value delivery including multiple small agile teams.

3. Train owner of the lines of business or product lines and other key stakeholders before launching agile transformation in order to align transformation approach.

4. Establish Agile Coaches CoPs including organization level internal agile coaches and product line agile guardians.

5. Product line agile guardians are the agile transformation agents and owners of each product line, and they need to feedback progress to higher management and seek assistance periodically.

6. Applying agile mindset to introduce new agile practices. Apply an iterative and incremental approach through a coaching backlog.

7. Make the agile transformation progress visual, and track measure and get feedback iteratively.

Organization Structure for Large-Scale Agile

1. Every small agile team (less than 10 people) needs one dedicated product owner who owns the team’s story backlog.

2. Every small agile team needs one dedicated ScrumMaster.

3. Besides PO and ScrumMaster, every small agile team has programmers and testers etc. who works face-to-face, as a co-located, cross-functional and self-organized team.

4. A large scaled agile team which including multiple small agile teams needs one dedicated product manager who owns the product feature backlog.

5. A large scaled agile team needs one dedicated Chief ScrumMaster (same as RTE, the Release Train Engineer in SAFe).

6. Establish a system team for the product line, it has SCM engineers, automation test experts, and DevOps masters, etc. This team is responsible for managing the build and test environments, DevOps tools and platforms etc.

Agile Requirements

1. The product manager defines the product vision and aligns the whole large scale team to business objectives and goals.

2. Business leaders manage product portfolio systematically; product managers and other stakeholders align to the product roadmap according to the portfolio strategies and priorities.

3. The product manager leads the product management team of the product owners to clarify and confirm the requirements in a rolling fashion and in small batches by applying MVP thinking and keeping the Backlog always ready for subsequent iterations.

4. Requirements are structured according to an epic->feature->story structure.

5. Use product-level Kanban board to manage product line requirement status (Feature).

Agile Architecture

1. Large agile teams need architects who are responsible for the architecture of the software system. Architects have decision-making authority.

2. The architect and key team members decide to address architectural risk with a deliberate and intentional architecture to guide iteration outcomes.

Large-Scale Agile Operation

1. All small agile teams have the same iteration cadence. A 2-week iteration cycle is highly recommended.

2. All small agile teams have a consistent start date and end date for each iteration.

3. All members of the large-scale agile team participate in the agile transformation launch meeting; leaders are invited to clarify the background and expectations of agile transformation.

4. Train all members for the entire product at once, at both product line and team level.

5. All members in a product line/level large-scale agile team participate physically in the agile release planning meeting in the same big room at the beginning of each cycle.

6. Business owner/product line management are invited to participate in the release plan meeting. They have the responsibility to introduce the business background and assign the business value to the release plan objectives.

7. Invite business representatives to participate in the release planning meeting and support product managers and product owners to clarify requirements when needed.

8. Establish a fixed release planning meeting rhythm, with each release plan comprising 2-4 iterations.

9. For the bi-monthly release planning meeting, you can choose to conduct one big room meeting where all the members of product line participate in.

10. For every monthly release planning meeting, you can hold a joint planning meeting involving the representatives of every small agile team.

11. Product line level retrospective meeting is held at the end of each release cycle and all the members of the product line are expected to participate.

12. Decouple releases milestones from development cadence; development applies a (2 weeks) iteration rhythm, whereas release milestones are identified according to business needs or decisions.

13. Use the product program board to visualize the release plans of each small agile team, the dependences among internal and external teams, and product release milestones.

14. All small agile team representatives and relevant stakeholders participate in SoS twice a week to synchronize progress, manage dependencies, identify milestone gaps, obstacles and risks in front of the product program board.

15. Product managers and product owners regularly synchronize or review requirements, with a rhythm of at least once a week.

16. After each iteration, the business representatives and all the members of the product line participate in the system demo meeting to review product demonstrations that integrates the work from all the teams.