Experiences Applying Agile Practices to Large Systems

Literature has credited agile development practices with saving failing projects and helping with the success of many others. The projects of many agile success stories have similar characteristics - small teams, co-located, relatively free of reporting and governance constraints, etc. This paper presents experiences applying agile practices to large systems projects. The information was gathered from multiple large projects and covers practices that scaled successfully as well as those that did not. We present agile development practices, the value they bring to both developers and business, and based on our experience, which practices successfully scale to large systems.