Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)

A framework for scaling agile development to multiple teams.

Practices Employed

• Coordination Risk: LeSS focuses on cross-team coordination through practices like Scrum of Scrums and joint planning. Referred to as:
  • Sprint Planning One
• Prioritising: LeSS uses a single Product Backlog for the entire product, regardless of the number of teams. Referred to as:
  • Product Backlog Refinement
• Retrospectives: LeSS includes both team-level retrospectives and an Overall Retrospective for organizational improvement.
• Review: A single Sprint Review is held for the entire product increment produced by all teams.
• Scrum: LeSS is Scrum scaled, so all Scrum practices apply at the team level.
• Version Control: Continuous integration of all code into a single trunk is a requirement for LeSS.

Addresses / Mitigates

Risk	Practices
Agency Risk	Review: Reviewing work or activity can ensure good behaviour.
Communication Risk	Review: Maintains alignment with design principles and goals.
Complexity Risk	Review: Identifies unnecessary complexity and communicates necessary complexity to the rest of the team.
Coordination Risk	Coordination Risk: Identifies and addresses historic coordination issues through regular reviews. Retrospectives: Identifies and addresses historic coordination issues through regular reviews. Version Control: Facilitates collaboration by allowing multiple developers to work on the codebase simultaneously.
Deadline Risk	Prioritising: In order to hit a deadline, you can de-prioritise less important work.
Feature Fit Risk	Coordination Risk: Captures feedback and adjusts features to meet evolving needs. Retrospectives: Captures feedback and adjusts features to meet evolving needs.
Funding Risk	Prioritising: Allocates resources efficiently to high-impact areas.
Implementation Risk	Review: Ensures quality and correctness of work products. Version Control: Maintains a history of changes, allowing rollback to previous versions if needed.
Internal Model Risk	Coordination Risk: Looking at what went wrong before leads to improving the internal model of risk for the future. Retrospectives: Looking at what went wrong before leads to improving the internal model of risk for the future. Review: Reviews and audits can uncover unseen problems in a system.
Market Risk	Prioritising: Ensures that the most valuable features and opportunities are addressed first.
Process Risk	Coordination Risk: Continuously improves processes and practices. Retrospectives: Continuously improves processes and practices.
Reliability Risk	Review: Reviews and audits can be performed to investigate the causes of unreliability in a system.
Schedule Risk	Prioritising: Helps in focusing on high-priority tasks.

Attendant Risks

Attendant Risk	Practices
Communication Risk	Version Control: Poor version management can be chaotic and leave lots of work in progress.
Coordination Risk	Review: Synchronous reviews require effective coordination among team members.
Deadline Risk	Prioritising: Establishing an order of events often places deadlines on the earlier events completing or the later events starting.
Market Risk	Prioritising: Prioritising a single client or narrowing scope reduces diversification, increasing exposure to changes in the market.
Reliability Risk	Prioritising: Prioritization can create dependencies on specific tasks or features.
Schedule Risk	Coordination Risk: Requires coordination and can disrupt regular workflows. Retrospectives: Requires coordination and can disrupt regular workflows. Review: Reviews can introduce delays in the project timeline.

Description

"Large-scale scrum is an organizational system for product development that scales scrum with varied rules and guidelines, developed by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman. There are two levels to the framework: the first level, designed for up to eight teams; and the second level, known as 'LeSS Huge', which can accommodate development involving hundreds of developers." - Large-scale Scrum, Wikipedia

LeSS is built on the principle that scaling should be about de-scaling organizational complexity—reducing roles, processes, and artifacts rather than adding them. It emphasizes a single product owner and a single product backlog for the entire product, ensuring all teams are aligned toward the same goal.

See Also