Synopsis:
To get Agile to work, we need to reduce dependencies to create independent teams. That is common sense! And it is wrong.
When multiple teams work on one product, the teams need to work closely together to ensure it truly becomes one product. Teams need to learn from each other, help each other, and together build one product. They need to have dependencies with each other, a lot of them! However, many people and teams have bad experiences with dependencies. In their experience, the dependencies blocked them from making progress. It doesn't have to be that way!
So, how can teams work together and what enables this?
Speaker's Bio:
Bas Vodde is a coach, programmer, trainer, and author related to modern agile and lean product development. He is the creator of the LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) framework for scaling agile development. He coaches organizations on three levels: organizational, team, individual/technical practices. He has trained thousands of people in software development, Scrum, and modern agile practices for over a decade.
He is the author of Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, Scaling Agile and Lean Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum, and of Practices for Large-Scale Agile and Lean Development, all together with Craig Larman.
Bas works for Odd-e, a company that supports organizations in improving their product development, mostly in Asia and Europe.
Bas currently lives in Amsterdam again, after living in Singapore, China, and Finland. He worked in start-ups and in very traditional environments. This last uncomfortable experience convinced him that agile and lean development is a more human way of developing software products -- no matter how large your development is.
He had the opportunity to introduce Agile Development (particularly Scrum) in Nokia Networks (formally NSN) but had to move to Helsinki. There he watched dozens of product groups adopt scrum and other agile practices. The extreme cold in Finland forced him to migrate south and back to China where he focused on one large product group and its Scrum adoption.
Bas is interested in Scrum with a special focus on large companies and large product development. But he also enjoyed working on technical practices, especially test-driven development (particularly in embedded environments) and continuous integration. He keeps working as a developer because he strongly believes you need a well-factored code base if you want to be fast and flexible. His hobbies are studies in lean production and quality management and, of course, programming.
Bas is also one of the authors of the CppUTest unit test framework for C/C++ and of Osaka a Mac UI automation framework written in Ruby.
Bas Vodde's upcoming LeSS training in NYC is posted here.
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