Agile Project Management For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 19

De-Scaling across Organizations

IN THIS CHAPTER

Identifying when and why to scale across multiple teams

Understanding the basics of scaling

Exploring scaling challenges

Depending on the schedule, scope, and required skills, many small and medium-sized product development efforts can be accomplished with a single scrum team. Larger efforts, however, may require more than one scrum team to achieve the product goal and release goals in a reasonable go-to-market time frame. When more than one scrum team is required, the teams need effective inter-team collaboration, communication, and synchronization. Regardless of the development effort’s size, if interdependencies exist between multiple teams working together on the same product, or even across a collection of products, you may need to scale. Be aware, however, that scaling is an anti-pattern to agility.

With agile techniques, you decompose requirements into the most simple, independent channels of value, which enables the team to deliver working product early and continuously. Scaling is the opposite of decomposition, introducing dependencies. Rather than introducing overhead to deal with these dependencies, the goal ...