LeSS with Gene and James: Communicate in Code & Integrate Continuously

Agile Carpentry

Jan 24 2023 • 14 mins

The following two LeSS guides for technical excellence are captured in Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS.

  • Guide: Communicate in Code.  This is the best way for developers to exchange information and understand each other's work.  Reading someone's clean code and not having the need to be given additional interpretation of what the code means is a strong indicator of developer's proficiency
  • Guide: Integrate Continuously:  "We have installed Jenkins and connected it to Jira" - is hardly an indication that a team has CI/CD pipeline.  The ladder should be viewed as developer's practice/behavior, not as a tool.

Below are some LeSS experiments that are supportive of these two guides:

  • Try… Very early, develop a walking skeleton with tracer code
  • Avoid… Architects hand off to ‘coders’
  • Try… Technical leaders teach during code reviews
  • Try… Raise awareness of the negative impact of legacy code

In their short recorded message, James and Gene are talking about these guides, experiments and some real life experience.

The above experiments are detailed in Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum