Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises

Chapter 18Systems of Systems and the Agile Release Train

When building large-scale systems of systems in a substantially agile manner, the practice of agility gets a little more complicated. But then, what doesn’t?

In the last two chapters, we spent time discussing complications that arise when systems get large enough to expand beyond the boundaries of what can be accomplished by one or two collocated, agile component teams. Indeed, many of the assumptions that the lighter weight methods have used to teach us agility may no longer apply.

However, in Chapter 16, Intentional Architecture, we looked at ways of organizing around the systems architecture so that local teams could operate in an almost completely agile and self-contained fashion, ...