Scaling Lean & Agile Development by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

Some time ago at work, our VP at the time ordered everyone to read two books. Everyone was sent their own personal copies. One of them was Scaling Lean & Agile Development by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde.

As the title suggests, this book is about scrum in large projects. This includes large embedded software systems with tens of millions of lines of code, hundreds of programmers in offices worldwide. As a running example the authors often talk about the software that goes into a large sized printer/photocopy machine.

This is a very good book. The authors definitely have the credentials to talk about large scale scrum, having practised it on the big printer projects and other large programs. An important theme is about the scrum teams themselves. The authors emphasize that the individual scrum teams must be physically located together to be a real scrum team and be effective. It's fine to have multiple teams in different sites and time zones, however each individual team must all be together.

There's a 19 page scrum primer at the end of the book. I found this incredibly useful and valuable. To think of the time and money I saw squandered on bringing in dodgy scrum "consultants" / "trainers". We spent three days flipping pennies and other worthless exercises. It would have been 100 times better to have just handed everyone a copy of this book and sent them home for 3 days to read it. Or even half a day to thoroughly read and understand the 19 page primer and we would have had far smoother and more successful scrum adoption.

My biggest regret is at work I've tried to discuss this book and how valuable it is with my coworkers. Alas, it proved to be a one sided conversation as unfortunately few seem to have read it despite my enthusiasm and recommendations.

One thing I've always wondered about the book though. As noted, it was a VP who commissioned a copy for everyone. What did the VP mean by sending everyone a copy. Some possibilities come to mind as to what was the VPs message to the dev teams, in particular the directors, managers and team leads

this is a description of what we are already doing at this time

this is an order to switch the software development to do what is described in the book

the book is suggestions to evaluate what we are currently doing, and move toward the practices described in the book


Alas since the last major reorg I no longer report to that VP so I can only speculate.