While ensuring broader objectives of your business to the stakeholders and multiple teams, your organization must know how to scale Agile principles with them. Below are seven steps to Scale Agile principles of software development in an organization:

Step 1: Bring everyone on board

This is the most important and the most challenging step of all for scaling Agile. Your organization must ensure buy-in from the Managers, Executives, and other leaders to bring everyone on board effectively with your intended transitions. These people support the implementation and sponsor the change by setting the goal, showing the path, and eliminating any obstacles. Later select and train Lean-Agile Change Agents so that they can empower teams with the training, horsepower, and knowledge required to carry out particular process transitions within the teams.

Step 2: For scaling Agile, adopt Lean-Agile frameworks

The three steering Lean-Agile frameworks for solving the problem of agility at scale will be LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), DA 2.0 (Disciplined Agile 2.0), and SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), even though there are many others. Depending on the different characteristics and needs every organization will decide on the framework that they can adapt to work on. If an element is missing in one framework, then feel free to consider it from multiple frameworks. This will help you to develop a custom strategy that is contingent on your company.

Step 3: Organize teams cross-functionally

A cross-functional team is a group of people who have all the required skills and power to determine, build, examine, and deploy a total increment of work themselves without giving it to others who are not a portion of their team. They also can self-organize to find out the most suitable way to finish that work. It includes a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, Front-end/Back-end/Mobile developers, QA engineers, UI/UX specialists, and Business Analysts. Organizing a cross-functional team untangles matters of conflicting importance, improves quality and communication, assures consistent priority on consumer experience, expands alignment and benefit of resources, iterates quickly, and directs to bigger innovation.

Step 4: Apply Agile Strategies both Downstream and Upstream

Downstream Agile activities eliminate the obstacle between testing, development, and operations while upstream Agile activities eliminate the obstacle between development teams and business. Before it was satisfactory for companies to start their changeover by concentrating mostly on upstream Agile activities and then adding downstream Agile activities eventually to the process. But now it is not the case. Agile transformation should be kicked off by development teams by embracing both downstream and upstream Agile activities in tandem. Operations partners develop infrastructure and automation of Agile for them to enforce.

Step 5: Implement continual testing

Continuous testing if executed correctly serves as the main part of the downstream Agile process, given the high complexity and tempo of modern delivery of applications which is necessary to control risks in the business. To add constant testing to your process of Agile, begin by allocating full-time testers who have the skills of full-stack development to your cross-functional crews, moving the kinds of testing ahead in the product life cycle. Quality Assurance engineers must be embedded from the beginning in Agile projects by enabling them to function closely with the growth of the innovation and structure of the product. Also, test design automation and execution help to fasten manual testing and control growing product complexity.

Step 6: Keep up Large-scale incremental and continuous delivery

All Agile teams support an incremental and consecutive development method. The meaning of this is each subsequent version of the product released is useful and forms upon the last version by building on new-user evident functionality. The capacity to discharge incrementally is the crucial element of the constant delivery pipeline and gives information to the teams that they want to determine whether additional analysis of a feature/idea is guaranteed if recent functionality should be put in or probably if a distinct strategy is guaranteed. If your organization wants to keep up incremental delivery, then it must possess the System of Record which is the list of what has been delivered already, assure you have proper documentation, and integrate constant feedback into your ongoing release cycle.

Step 7: Adopt the tools required to support and scale enterprise Agile

As organizations switch from small teams and Agile projects to more potentially allotted teams and complex projects, they also need to shift from spreadsheets and paper to tools that prove workflows, traceability, automation, and data persistence. Enterprise Agile cannot be done well unless there is the latest technology to favor it – offloading manual tasks of huge quantity, crystallizing processes, and facilitating collaboration of deep business-IT. Project management tools and planning of Agile combine with test management tools and downstream ALM to facilitate enterprise-scale Agile methods by orchestrating and automating business-driven objectives and norms into the lifecycle of DevOps.

Scaling Agile – Timeline

Scaling Agile development takes time regardless of your organization’s position on the scope of Agile maturity. Organizations that have experienced Agile transformations have taken years to be so. Once this is accepted, you can follow those points to Scale Agile to build a way for departments, teams, organizations, and the business units to move to Enterprise Agile.