Agile teams large or small, co-located or distributed, have one very important common denominator: the absolute imperative that a strong product owner be established before any work begins. Arguably the strongest, or weakest, link in any Agile team is the product owner. At odds with this basic fact is a startling oversight of this role at the outset of many projects. Add to this a multi-site outsourced development team and it's no wonder successful enterprise Agile adoption is slow going. What makes a good product owner? Why is this role critical to the success of any Agile project? How should this role be supported within the team and organization?
Delivering working software against all odds by using tools, metrics, and guerilla XP tactics.
One of the common objections to using Agile approaches is, "What if our project is too big?" Indeed, Agile almost invariably equals small teams. However, our experience of the past 2.5 years shows that Agile methods such as XP and Scrum can be successfully applied to large scale projects.
This article will cover four years of cooperation between StarSoft and one of its major customers, and the organizational model, roles, and responsibilities used in this highly successful relationship based on Extreme Programming.
Agile project management with Scrum derives from best business practices in companies like Fuji-Xerox, Honda, Canon, and Toyota. Toyota routinely achieves four times the productivity and 12 times the quality of competitors. Can Scrum do the same for globally distributed teams? Two Agile companies, SirsiDynix and StarSoft Development Laboratories achieved comparable performance developing a Java application with over 1,000,000 lines of code.