Agile Doesn't Scale...Without Architecture

This presentation was created for the SATURN conference series and does not necessarily reflect the positions and views of the Software Engineering Institute.

In this presentation, we share our experiences at John Deere in scaling Agile development with respect to factors such as system complexity, team size, and the degree of global distribution of developers.

We elaborate on short- and long-term effects that a paradigm shift to Agile software development exhibited and how the scaling factors influenced the respective transitioning strategies to be followed. We highlight philosophical, technical, and managerial mismatches that can cause tensions between Agile developers and software architects and report on the effectiveness of solution ideas for leveraging the best of upfront design and agility to overcome these issues.

Besides the central message of this presentation—that architecture plays a pivotal role as a communication facilitator and enabler—we show potential pitfalls and remedies of migrating to architecture-centric Agile software development.