Introduction to LeSS in the Context of Digital Departments and Product Teams

In the current digital landscape, companies are not questioning if they should implement Agile methodologies. Instead, they are exploring how to scale Agile within their organizations to achieve their objectives.

This post will discuss Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), a Scaled Scrum framework used to develop large, complex IT products. It is designed for use by 3 to 8 Product Teams in its default configuration, or more than 8 Product Teams in LeSS Huge.

As digital products grow and evolve, a single Product Team (up to 10 people) often isn’t sufficient to develop product features on time. This is the rationale behind scaling Agile. We need to bring more people on board to stay competitive and meet market requirements successfully.

However, to understand how to scale Scrum with LeSS, let’s first briefly discuss what Scrum is.

Briefly, What is Scrum?

Scrum is a development framework used by teams worldwide to build complex products in a constantly changing and unpredictable environment. It is based on empiricism. Scrum is a framework based on three roles:

• Product Owner — knows what to do
• Development Team — knows how to do it
• Scrum Master — improves the process.

A Scrum Team consists of a PO, SM, and Dev Team (in total less than 10 people).

The framework is built around five ceremonies:

• Sprint — a time-boxed period (between 1 to 4 weeks) during which a part of the product is developed. The length of the Sprint (e.g., 2 weeks) is defined at the very beginning and adhered to throughout.
• Sprint Planning — planning what to do in the Sprint,
• Daily Scrum — daily team catch-up to check progress, problems, and next work to do,
• Sprint Review — review what has been done during the Sprint,
• Sprint Retrospective — a meeting for the team to investigate what went well and what can be improved in the next iterations.

And, Scrum has three Artifacts:

• Product Backlog — A list of all work to be done to develop and deploy the product. This is an emerging list,
• Sprint Backlog — work planned for a given Sprint,
• Increment — the result of each Sprint is an Increment, which must be integrated with all other Increments to build a potentially shippable product.

So, in brief, we work in iterations, each Iteration builds an Increment, which is Integrated with all other increments.

What is LeSS?

LeSS is a scaled Agile framework, or to be precise, a Scaled Scrum framework, which allows parallel work for more than three Product Teams. Teams are developing from a single Product Backlog, therefore the aim is to develop a single product (with plenty of functionalities).

Why use LeSS, instead of SAFe, DAD, SoS, Nexus? Well, everything depends on the problem you want to solve and your organization.

LeSS is much simpler to understand if your organization is already using Scrum. Moreover, it allows for two configurations:

• LeSS — up to eight teams
• LeSS Huge — more than eight teams, and still not complicated

How to Set Up Scaled Agile with LeSS?

LeSS is a straightforward Agile framework for scaling Scrum development. It has one Product Owner and one Product Backlog. Its goal is to deliver one Integrated increment of a potentially shippable product each Sprint.

Each LeSS Sprint starts with a Sprint Planning shared with all of the Product Teams. Each team takes the highest priority features to its Sprint Backlog. It is their commitment for a particular Sprint.

Shared Sprint Planning is followed by a second session of individual Sprint Planning. However, this time the event is held within the Product Teams. Teams discuss their strategies to develop required functionalities.

During the Sprint, Product Teams develop requirements, collaborate together to resolve dependencies between teams, and continuously integrate and deliver smaller Increments. Teams are responsible for handling problems related to team dependencies. There are no assigned coordinators.

During the Sprint, Product Teams pause their work to do the Product Backlog Refinement. The goal of this ceremony is to decompose bigger requirements into smaller, manageable tasks, revise estimates, and improve item descriptions/Acceptance Criteria.

At the end of the Sprint, there is a common Sprint Review ceremony, which aims to demo, discuss, and get feedback from relevant stakeholders.

After the Sprint Review, we have a Sprint Retrospective. The goal of retrospectives is to check how the Sprint went and what we can improve in our work. The Sprint Retrospective is divided into two parts:

• Retrospective — each Product Team investigates the process within their own Teams
• Overall Retrospective — this ceremony is held to improve work between the Product Teams.

How to Develop Big Ideas with LeSS HUGE?

If you want to develop a Product that requires more than eight Product Teams, then we follow a very similar process to the one described above. We call it LeSS Huge.

The goal of LeSS Huge is to create one, potentially shippable Product each Sprint. However, to simplify things, we distinguish one Area Product Owner (APO, a person that knows what to do) per a maximum of eight Product Teams. These are usually bigger EPICs or Themes. Each APO has an Area Backlog, which is a part of the larger Product Backlog held by one, single Product Owner.

On a bigger picture, it looks like we set up additional LeSS teams and plan from them a part of the work defined in the Product Backlog.

LeSS is based on Scrum, and it adds a minimal set of roles and ceremonies to successfully develop an Integrated Increment developed by more than three Product Teams. It is very easy to understand LeSS if you have a background in Scrum. However, if you do not have experience with Scrum or your team members did not work with Scrum previously, you should wait. First, try to implement Scrum in a single team, then try to scale it. If you want to eat an elephant, do it with small pieces. In this case, it is the same. Start small with Scrum, then scale it to LeSS.

References

Overview - Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)

Introduction to LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) - Dawson (youtube.com)