No. Agile Does Not Scale.

(but agility scales quite well, thank-you-very-much)

For example, it is impossible for 70,000 employees to collectively interact and be creative without source control, wikis, recruitment procedures and security policies. But agility means you allow the best tools and processes to emerge. Benevolent peer pressure instead of malevolent hierarchical control.

For example, to reliably and flexibly grow and expand an enormous code base, the descriptions of interfaces between subsystems should be in source control too. User documentation could be generated from source files. And all data about team members, user stories, builds, and releases should be considered part of the ever-evolving product itself.

For example, agility should mean that you start with as few rules as possible, telling everyone in your community that you trust them to do the right thing. However, you also create fallback scenarios for misbehavior, and only when the need arises, you communicate new rules, but in a good-natured way.

For example, even though large animals live longer than small animals, the large species go extinct more easily than the small ones, because they cannot adapt fast enough. Likewise, your product should be managed as an ecosystem of many small projects, instead of one big framework. It will live longer that way.

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Successful entrepreneur, Top 100 Leadership Speaker, Top 50 Management Expert, author of 4 books, junior in humility.

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Jurgen Appelo

Successful entrepreneur, Top 100 Leadership Speaker, Top 50 Management Expert, author of 4 books, junior in humility.