Agility and the Inconceivably Large

This report outlines the experiences of the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office product unit (hereafter referred to as "product unit") as it applied agile principles and practices while developing features for one of the largest commercially available pieces of software in the world, Microsoft\´s Visual Studioreg development system. Scaling agile to very large projects has proven challenging because of the escalating coordination requirements between many small teams. The product unit used the feature crew model to decouple individual teams within the project. This allowed teams to operate in a more agile manner while still participating in a much larger undertaking.