ABSTRACT
The challenge of scaling agile development practices to large systems, potentially including mechanical and hardware parts, serving B2B markets is a significant one. Traditionally, agile practices have focused predominantly on building functionality. Architecture, technical debt and refactoring have been aspects of software development that have received less attention. This has led to several cases where, over the sprints, the architecture of the system eroded to the point that adding new features became more and more complicated and effort consuming. The consequence tends to be a situation where assuring quality becomes increasingly difficult as changes in one part of the system lead to things breaking in other, seemingly unrelated, parts of the system.
