Scaling is the process of rapidly improving the quality and quantity of a product or service through a series of small incremental improvements. If made continuously over time, small improvements create enough progress to close the gap between what was deliverable previously and what is being deliverable now. Organizations need to understand and recognize agile scaling factors. Agile development teams use a series of tools, techniques, and software test techniques to evaluate the scope of each step in the software lifecycle. Agile scaling factors are needed for every stage of the software lifecycle, starting from planning, designing, implementing, maintaining, troubleshooting, and cleanup.
In the planning and design phase, the team size and resources needed are determined by assessing the current requirements. Then, agile scaling factors are used to identify how much further the project can go based on the resources currently available in this stage of the development cycle. Finally, to estimate the demand that will arise in the future, project managers consider two scenarios: either a steady increase in team size with new solutions to meet anticipated growth or a decline in team size with no new solutions being developed. Project managers then adjust the size of the software team to meet these demand scenarios, in addition to considering the team’s technical debt, the relative weights of legacy and non-legendary solutions, and the team’s expertise.
As the software design and development process are implemented, additional resources are added to the team, sometimes adding more people than were initially required. Agile Scaling Factors are used to estimate the additional capacity needed if all new team members are brought on board. A careful analysis of the entire lifecycle is necessary to determine when a considerable gain in volume should be initiated.
During the testing phase of Agile, the test teams determine the state of any potential issues that might arise due to implementation. Next, the team determines which potential problems will have the biggest impact on the deliverable and addresses those issues in a disciplined agile delivery lifecycle. In most cases, the testing teams find at this point in the life cycle that only a few problems need additional attention. These are the Agile Scaling Factors that determine whether or not additional work needs to be done to address the problem.
Agile development requires developing agile software development principles to help teams come together to find the right solutions faster. This process also requires that the teams maintain specific organizational patterns that support implementing best practices and agile development principles. These organizational patterns should include an analysis of the current geographical distribution of the teams and an effort to unify the understanding between all the teams regarding the purpose of each team, its relative size, geographical distribution, and the nature of its work.
