In October this year Codeworks DEV received the 2010 Agile Award for the “Best Use of Agile in the Public Sector”. The use of Agile Methods within large, publically accountable environments has long represented a challenge to the Agile community. Agility is more often associated with small to medium size enterprises (SME’s) in the private sector, where organisations are incentivised to keep pace with a changing business environment. Public sector companies and larger corporates, on the other hand, are renowned for their essentially prescriptive, “non-agile” attempts at long-term planning using techniques such as PRINCE2.

My team is in the middle of one of the hardest projects—we call them "themes"—we’ve ever tackled. We’re a high-functioning agile team that has helped our company grow and succeed over several years now—we “went agile” in 2003. Here’s one thing I know for sure: No matter how many problems you solve, new challenges will pop up.

Tired of guesstimating your estimation process just to create a completion date management will accept? Jonathan Kohl takes the guess work out of estimations by focusing on uncertainties. It may sound counterintuitive, but the idea is to focus on the fact that all projects face unforeseen delays. The rigorous estimation process Jonathan describes here provides your team a way that ensures enough time is scheduled for development and a date for completion management can agree upon.

Teams that work in large-scale, complex agile environments are often distributed. As a result, it is almost impossible to discuss distributed agile development without discussing the implications of working at scale. In this article, we will cover the following topics to help distributed, large-scale teams create their initial product backlog at the start of a project: