I've often heard and seen large teams struggle when implementing some agile project practices in large enterprises. I recently joined Corbis who were using many agile practices (introduced by my boss, David Anderson who wrote Agile Management book), but Continuous Integration and Automated Builds weren't on the list.
We discussed why CI was needed for a while, and then successfully implemented it. During this process, I kept careful notes on the barriers we encountered and how those barriers were overcome. On David's urging (I mentioned he was by boss right and does my reviews), I put together this draft article (attached to this post in PDF format). I'm keen to hear feeback on it.
Here is the Introduction -
Introduction
Continuous Integration and an Automated Build process are common practices employed by many high-functioning agile software teams. Many small teams are reporting high productivity improvements, but success stories of Continuous Integration and Automated Builds for Enterprise Scale software projects are much rarer. Some agile pundits have stated that there is a scale limitation for agile practices and these practices are in-appropriate for Enterprise Scale (or high staff count) projects.
This article aims to explore if and why the measurable benefits of Continuous Integration and Automated Build processes begin to decline as application size, and team size grows.
Our conclusion is that there is no inherent reason why Continuous Integration and Automate Build processes won’t scale to any size team. In fact, this article concludes that the problems these techniques solve are a higher pain point for Enterprise Scale applications and become more essential than ever. In addition, this article provides guidance on how to scale agile practices and how to make smart architectural choices up-front to ensure smooth adoption of Continuous Integration and Automated Builds leading to smoother projects and improved success rates.
Interested in your thoughts....
Troy.