Scaling Agile: Finding your Agile Tribe

The ability of agile practices to scale to "large" software development efforts (more than three teams or 30 team members) has been widely debated in recent years. While a variety of inhibitors to scaling agile are frequently cited, this experience report describes how the primary challenge to scaling agile that we faced was finding the right people to build our agile tribe. The effective adoption of agile requires passionate, motivated individuals who accept change, think like a business owner, operate willingly outside team walls, and identify and drive program issues. Finding such a large number of people with these qualities is much more difficult than establishing methods to support communications, progress tracking, and other agile practices. We conclude by describing the attributes of the type of person that we believe will thrive in a large-scale agile shop.