A Distributed Large-Scale Agile Software Development for Multiple Products and Its Practical Evaluation

Abstract

In agile software development, there are several well-known frameworks by integrating rules and methods. Among them, Scrum-based agile frameworks for large organizations need much knowledge and experience to start it, although Scrum has fewer rules and is easy to start. Among other known frameworks, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), which has complicated rules, has lots of case studies than others. However, Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) and LeSS Huge are also known and have lots of case studies in Japan, so enhancing LeSS and LeSS Huge framework is one of the well-developed ways to solve the organization's issues quickly. This paper aims to propose a new method, named Multi-Products Agile Method, based on LeSS Huge for developing multiple products in parallel at a large organization. We applied the proposed method to three products based in Japan. We had been tracking the velocity that is a total number of about 10 teams for one year. Our results prove that the proposed method is an effective way to scale agile organizations for multiple products. The method also makes it possible to use the knowledge and experiences of LeSS or LeSS Huge. We conclude Multi-Products Agile Method is an extended framework of LeSS and LeSS Huge.