About LeSS

When the Agile Manifesto was created many ‘knew’ that agile development was for small groups. However, we became interested in—and got increasing requests—to apply Agile and Scrum to very large and multisite product development. In 2005, Bas and Craig started working together in Nokia Siemens Networks where they combined their experiences and created the LeSS Framework. Since then, LeSS has been aplied to products as small as 2 teams and as large as 2500 people in product companies (such as telecom vendors), project-based companies (such as Valtech) and internal-products (such as JP Morgan).

LeSS Creators

About Craig

Craig Larman serves as an organizational design consultant, with a focus on organizational redesign and systems thinking, for flexible, high-value-throughput product organizations. His emphasis is Large-Scale Scrum, and scaling agile principles and practices and lean thinking to very large, multisite, and agile offshore development (often, embedded systems, telecommunications, or investment banking), and coaching executive teams to succeed with larger enterprise-level agile and lean methods adoption.

Craig has served as the lead coach of lean software development adoption at Xerox, and serves or has served as a consultant for large-scale Scrum and enterprise agile adoption at Ericsson, JP Morgan, Cisco-Tandberg, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Alcatel-Lucent, UBS, Nokia Networks, Thomson Reuters, Ion Trading, and Statoil, among many other clients. Craig has also served as chief scientist at Valtech, a consulting, outsourcing, and skills transfer organization with divisions in many countries, with a division in Bangalore that applies agile methods to offshore development. In his role at Valtech, he helped create “agile offshore development” while living in India and China. His work focuses on product groups that involve a few hundred to a few thousand people, usually multisite.

About Bas

Bas Vodde is an experienced coach in agile and lean development (with a focus on Scrum and LeSS). He enjoys debugging organizations and has served on the leadership team of a large telecom product. He has worked for years on the largest LeSS Huge adoption he is aware of – large groups require patience. He also enjoys the actual software development and is an active contributor to Open Source (mostly in C++ and Ruby)

Bas has lived in Holland, China, Finland and Singapore and has a lot of experience in diverse working environment and seen how a lot of multi-national organizations work (or don’t work…). He loves reading books and writing software and keeps on learning from his two sons.

Bas is the author of Scaling Agile & Lean Development, Practices for Scaling Lean and Agile Development and Large-Scale Scrum. He is maintainer of the CppUTest C++ unit test framework and the Osaka Mac GUI automation library

The LeSS Company B.V.

The LeSS Company was setup in 2014 with the purpose of promoting LeSS, offering certified LeSS training and promoting LeSS coaching. The company was setup by Bas Vodde, Craig Larman, and Johan Schoenmaker. It is registered in the Netherlands.

Less.works

The less.works site has been created with the help of the following people:

• Bas Vodde
• Craig Larman
• Terry Yin
• Alan Atlas
• Bernie Quah
• Fredrick Dittlau