QCon London 2011 began with a very entertaining keynote from Craig Larman, titled “Scaling Lean & Agile: Large, Multisite or Offshore Delivery”.

Larman’s most important piece of advice was perhaps a little surprising, given that the talk was about scaling up agile development processes to large distributed teams and that he has written books on the subject.  His advice was basically “Don’t do it!”  He recommended that teams should be kept small – ten people or less – if possible.  This certainly struck a chord with me, having learned long ago that small teams are far more productive and effective than large teams.

Leaving that aside though, Larman went on to make a number of points about scaling Scrum up to teams of hundreds located at multiple sites, most of which is detailed in his books on the subject.  He also gave general advice such as use configuration, not branching, to customise software and build cross-functional teams with no specialists.

Ever the showman, Larman dropped a number soundbites which were quickly seized upon by the tweeters in the audience:

• “We should encourage a culture of master programmers not PowerPoint architects”
• “Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don’t construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden”

The talk ended with one final piece of advice which went down very well with the audience: avoid heavyweight process tools from IBM/Rational.  Another lesson I learned many years ago after spending man-weeks producing UML models which quickly became out of date, when I could have been creating useful software.

Larman has since elaborated on some of these points in an InfoQ article:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/large-scale-agile-design-and-architecture