Specifying the Projects in Focus
This book is derived from my experience on projects with teams ranging in size from one to two-hundred people. I learned a lot about scaling agile processes while working with these different-sized teams. In my experience, you will encounter significant changes in dynamics with a team of twenty or more. So, although this book deals mainly with issues faced by teams with more than one hundred members, those projects with ten or more people will also benefit from this book, especially if they are embedded in a large organization.
Due to the limits of my own experience, I do not examine the special aspects of teams with 1,000 people or more. However, I assume that issues and challenges similar to those I address in this book are experienced in these circumstances. This book attempts to elucidate the agile value system and show a way to preserve these values on large projects. Doing so clarifies the difference between the agile value system and its realization in a specific process, such as Extreme Programming.
My experience is mainly with co-located teams that outsourced only minor parts of their development effort. Although dispersed development is not a focal topic of this book, I discuss it in Chapters 3 and 6.
The projects I worked on were varied in nature. I worked with teams in the financial sector, the automobile industry, telecommunications, and the software industry.
Of course, I have exchanged my experiences with a lot of other people, most of whom had experiences similar to mine, on teams that were similarly sized. Some of them have experience with teams of 350 people or more and still encountered the sort of challenges I discuss.
In this way, the issues and suggestions pointed out in this book are based on experiences with large teams and large projects—either my own or those of my colleagues.