Scaling Agile: Remembering Tolstoy’s Unhappy Family Analogy

While Agile has become mainstream at the team level with much research and practical experience, scaling agile to the enterprise is a topic of increasing interest and practice—with some successes and some spectacular failures. As Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mariya Breyter shares anti-patterns for scaling agile that you need to recognize quickly and change right away. Most agile scaling frameworks address agile processes and organizational structures. However, Mariya thinks it is time to look at agile scaling from the perspective of individual team members: developers, architects, testers, or any member of a cross-functional agile team. Using examples from multiple companies that she transitioned to agile at scale, Mariya describes how you can enhance your agile implementation at the enterprise level and avoid the pitfalls that can sink an enterprise agile program.