Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

Craig Larman is one of the brightest minds in IT product and project development frameworks. While you can watch his great YouTube videos on LeSS, some with co-LeSS creator, Bas Vodde, this book encapsulates many of their previous works and makes for a great Bible/blueprint/manual for how to scale Scrum for an organization that has had some success with Scrum with individual teams. What Larman called Framework 1 is now just referred to as LeSS (usually for <=8 teams). For what Larman used do call Framework 2, he now calls LeSS Huge. That's for >8 teams and has additional hierarchy with the one Product Owner designating different "Application Areas" as an attribute for each of the main Product Backlog items. Under that Product Owner (reporting to her) are APOs (Application Product Owners), each with a minimum of four teams in their application area. This books spells it out all quite neatly along with the philosophy and wisdom of Larman and Vodde. Quite a treasure. The great illustrations by Sketch Post make the ideas visually memorable. A MUST for any bookshelf and mindshelf. If your company is planning to scale Scrum, strongly consider watching the Larman LeSS YouTube videos and reading this book before considering SAFe, which is likely much more prescriptive than you need during this next phase.

This is by far the best book about Agile and Scrum that I have ever read (and I have read plenty). LeSS is a strategy for extending Scrum to more than one team, possibly 10s or 100s (LeSS Huge). But the insights and practical advice this book gives apply to Scrum at even the smallest scale, and are simply invaluable. They validate so much of what I have been doing and saying as an Agile Coach and Scrum Master for so many years. Very readable, with clear and compelling reasoning, and no BS.For example, there's a nice chart on page 138 showing how, as time passes, a Scrum Master's focus with a team will move from working with the Team and Product Owner, to working with the Organization and Development Practices. The latter areas are the real payoff, and I have been telling people that for years but this is the first time I've seen it in print.This book goes way beyond the kind of step-by-step instruction one gets in "how to be a Scrum Master" or "here's how Scrum works" books. I highly recommend it!

There is so much powerful content within the pages of this book. It clearly explains how to take the best of Agile to a large scale organization while proposing great ideas on how to solve most of the problems that come along with scaling. It also proposes simple ideas on how to boost the power of Agile development principles even more, such as: communities of practice, scouting, design workshops, etc.This book is a great tool for organizations that want to move to large scale Scrum or want to refresh their knowledge in the search for continuous improvement.

Just received the new book and browsing through it the topics resonate with my core agile bones. So much of what is written and explained within this book is what I would want all levels of an organization to deeply understand when they are embarking on an agile transition. When I reflect upon the successful transitions I've been a part of I see these patterns and behaviors detailed in the pages of this resource to be the keys to the transition. Also the failures I've experienced seem to be the organizations that couldn't wrap their minds around the basics that are very well described and detailed in the wonderful book.

Good overview of challenges and techniques involved in implementing large scale scrum / agile across an organization. For those already familiar with scrum / agile this should be pretty easy to follow. The author also encourages experimentation to determine what fits and does not with your organization and culture.

Many practical insights and useful tips. Good to read as a different approach to the Scaled Agile Framework for modern larger organizations

In summary: less is more so Scaled Scrum is Scrum.I expect this book to be the new global benchmark for scaled Scrum. The principles, rules and guides are aligned with Nexus but it has way more content.This is a must-read for every Scrum Master so we can take our profession to the next level.

While this is really a great book about Scrum and Agile and practices, I found it not really focusing on addressing the specifics and problems that arise at scale and how to address them. In other words, just do Scrum by the book and everything will be fine - an overly idealistic approach.

This is a great book, offering a lightweight alternative to SAFE which is a more complicated and heavy system, LESS is a nice simple framework explained clearly and simply with beautiful examples by Craig.

Stephen Denning’s introduction to this book does identify some of the challenges facing organisations scaling their agile adoptions, but I was left at the end wondering whether the book answers them. Denning says: ‘like scrum, Less is not a process for building products’. However the scrum guide says ’Scrum is a framework for developing…products’. Those two sentences put together cause me an immediate unease but I am sure Mr Denning, the consummate and agile consultant that he is, could free himself with one bound. He also says ‘LeSS is deliberately incomplete. It leaves space for vast situational learning.’ That is a common caveat for those unwilling to have their dogma tested too thoroughly by the ravages of real life, reason or logic. The ‘hybrid approach’, the ‘lightweight framework’ are often indicators of evidence-free thinking. Its especially concerning when you read the book which seems actually to be pretty heavy on prescription, and for reserving a position that any failure to achieve the mythical outcomes of agility are more likely due to you ‘not doing it right’ rather than anything else. The agile ‘elephants in the room’ were identified in by Phillippe Kruchten 2011 – this book seems to be promoting elephant conservation which is a good thing in most ways but not in the way referred to here. I present one example from Kruchten’s list: “7. Politics A more systematic and thorough acknowledgment that organizational politics play a big role”. Larman and Vodde seem to want to defenestrate the politicians because they get in the way of their establishment of Rousseau’s Geneva. In my experience the politicians are the one flying in the company jets and that isn’t going to change in the near term. I am not sure I see much encouragement to ‘fill in the gaps’ in any way other than the ways proposed by the authors. That said, what I do like about Larman’s books is his offering of scenario stories and practical approaches for wrestling with some of the challenges confronting agile. The book starts with a scenario of a team handling a recently identified regulatory change in financial services. As someone who has worked at times in that space it allows me to think: is that how real life could or would EVER work, and would the approach suggested result in any better outcomes than actually happened. Each individual scenario and use case may be alluring in its simplicity, but the cross currents of conflicting priorities mean that real life is rarely that amenable to formulaic answers. Jeff Sutherland in his book on Scrum compares decision making cycles to Vietnam-war era dog-fights and sometimes that is exactly what is happening – locked in a tail-spin with the missile-lock alert blaring in the cock-pit. I am sure we can all relate…and I leave it to you to decide whether agile, scrum and LeSS as explained here are a meaningful response. Another worked example later in the text de-constructs the mechanics of processing a financial instrument trade..again a scenario I have some experience with. I am drawn to the simplification, establishing an end to end happy path….it is a technique I have used myself many times despite users desires to complicate with endless exceptions and caveats. My worry is that architecting and delivering a thin sliver of functionality from a customer point of view is so far from the end-state as to make you wonder what good could possibly come of it. (My much more experienced and battle-scarred brother talks of his ‘crazy users who want a bicycle that goes sideways’) . You have something that works for 1,000 transactions a day, but if the very next item on the backlog is ‘as a high frequency trader I want to process 50,000 transactions an hour’ then you may have some hardware to order. And to what extent is anyone really using, or thinking about the sliver of a prototype you have proudly shipped to give you any meaningful feedback. Larman/Vodde explain that this book was a step back to simplify the entry point for LeSS, compared to more detailed earlier offerings and from that point of view it is indeed a relatively short and straightforward guide. The proof of the pudding though…

LeSS sits somewhere between Scrum and Nexus on the one side and SAFe on the other. If you have to choose between SAFe and LeSS, always choose LeSS. If you have the freedom to explore and work the way you want and you have some influence in how crossteam concerns are addressed: read the Scrum guide, read about Lean & Kanban, and plot your own course. Read about Nexus and LeSS for inspiration when you notice you're running into impediments while working on a product backlog that involves more than just your own team, but don't expect this book to offer a way of working that's as concrete and impactful as Scrum itself.

Great book, easy to digest and told me everything I need to know about LeSS.

Fine!