Scaling Agile at Dell: Real-life Problems - and Solutions

The transition from waterfall-based software development to an agile, iterative model carries with it well-known challenges and problems-entrenched cultures, skill gaps, and organizational change management. For a large, globally distributed software development organization, an entirely different set of practical challenges comes with scaling agile practices. Last year the Dell Enterprise Solutions Group applied agile practices to more than forty projects ranging from a collocated single team project to projects that consisted of fifteen Scrum teams located across the US and India. Geoff Meyer and Brian Plunkett explain how Dell mined these real-life projects for their empirical value and adapted their agile practices into a flexible planning model that addresses the project complexities of staffing, scale, interdependency, and waterfall intersection. Join Geoff and Brian to see how they tackled the tough, real-life problems scaling agile at Dell: functional-based organizational boundaries, globally distributed teams, contractor challenges, multi-team projects, and dependencies on teams that continued to develop using waterfall methods.