Gain insights into applying Agile methods in large projects and teams. Explore challenges, best practices, and strategies to secure organizational buy-in for successful implementation.

Agile methods allow us to handle rapidly changing requirements, typical in most software projects. These methods are conventionally used for small teams and software projects. However, in this course, you will learn how to effectively apply Agile methods to large software projects and large teams.

You’ll start with a recap of the Agile Manifesto, followed by a description of the common challenges associated with Agile methods in the context of large software projects. You’ll learn how Agile approaches have been applied to build responsibility. Next, you’ll learn about approaches to apply Agile methods in the processes. You will then learn best practices for applying Agile methods such as software testing, and software architecture. 

This course provides insights into successful and unsuccessful approaches to introducing agility to teams, processes, and technology aspects of large projects. It also teaches strategies to secure organizational buy-in for agility in the context of large projects and teams.

Applying Agile Methods to Large Teams and Projects

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Most often, the customer of a large company is either the company itself or the parent company. This is a completely alien situation to small companies. There is one big advantage to the customer being either ourselves or our parent company: the domain knowledge is in-house, even though accessing the knowledge is not always easy.

### Challenges with “a group of customers”
It is also common, on projects in large companies, for the customer to really be a group of customers. If this is the case, the project’s result will probably be standard software or something similar. The problem when developing for a group of customers is that there rarely is a single customer who can be integrated into the project. Even worse, the customers may compete among themselves. This makes it hard to get a customer on-site because there is no accepted representative of the group. Of course, the project team cannot solve these competition problems, but it can ask for regular feedback. Unfortunately, since the customers are competing with each other, this feedback can easily be contradictory and therefore not really helpful.

Moreover, it can also happen that the group of customers is anonymous. Usually, the number of customers is relative to the size of the project. Often, there are either several invisible customers, like for standard software, or there is a community of customers who have a similar—but unfortunately not the same—interest in the project.


Learn about the role of the customer and strategies to integrate the customer in agile development in the large.

Introduction to the Course

Agility and Largeness

Dealing with Large Teams

Dealing with the Process

Dealing with the Technology

Dealing with the Company

Putting It All Together: A Project Report (Case Study)

Final Thoughts

The Customer

Challenges with “a group of customers”