Implementing Program Model with Agile Principles in a Large Software Development Organization

Organizations developing software have increasing interest towards deployment of agile methods. However, there is a problem in scaling up scrum and other agile methods, since these were originally meant for individual team scope. It is not enough to deploy agile methods only on the team level - because of the dependencies that teams have between each other when developing large software systems, and because the software engineering teams need input for their decision making (or actual decisions) and need to be synchronized with other activities. We present one way of scaling up scrum to program level consisting of several scrum teams, concentrating on the changes done in the process front-end. We also describe a new artifact called Agile Policy that was created for large-scale agile deployment.