Speaker: Bas Vodde (THE LESS)

This talk is based on story-telling, where Bas will share the creation of LeSS and within that side-track on explaining better how LeSS works. Expect most of the session to be in story format and not in typical introduction to X format.
LeSS is a lightweight (agile) framework for scaling Scrum to more than one team. It was extracted out of the experiences of Bas Vodde and Craig Larman while Scaling Agile development in many different types of companies, products and industries over the last ten years. There are several case studies available and an upcoming book describing LeSS in detail.

LeSS consists of the LeSS Principles, the Framework, the Guides and a set of experiments. The LeSS framework is divided into two frameworks: basic LeSS for 2-8 teams and LeSS Huge for 8+ teams. All of these are also available on the less.works website.

LeSS is different with other scaling frameworks in the sense that it provides a very minimalistic framework that enables empiricism on a large-scale which enables the teams and organization to inspect-adapt their implementation based on their experiences and context. LeSS is based on the idea that providing too much rules, roles, artifacts and asking the organization to tailor it down is a fundamentally flawed approach and instead scaling frameworks should be minimalistic and allowing organizations to fill them in.

Bas Vodde is a coach, programmer, trainer, and author related to modern agile and lean product development. He is the creator of the LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) framework for scaling agile development. He coaches organizations on three levels: organizational, team, individual/technical practices. He has trained thousands of people in software development, Scrum, and modern agile practices for over a decade.

He is the author of Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, Scaling Agile and Lean Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum and of Practices for Large-Scale Agile and Lean Development, all together with Craig Larman.

Bas works for Odd-e, a company which supports organizations in improving their product development, mostly in Asia.

Bas currently lives in Singapore where he ended up after living in Holland (born), China and Finland. He worked in start-ups and in very traditional environments. This last uncomfortable experience convinced him that agile and lean development is a more human way of developing software products — no matter how large your development is.

He had the opportunity to introduce Agile Development (particularly Scrum) in Nokia Networks (formally NSN) but had to move to Helsinki. There he watched dozens of product groups adopt scrum and other agile practices. The extreme cold in Finland forced him to migrate south and back to China where he focused on one large product group and its Scrum adoption.

Bas is interested in Scrum with a special focus on large companies and large product development. But he also enjoyed working on technical practices, especially test-driven development (particularly in embedded environments) and continuous integration. He keeps working as a developer because he strongly believes you need a well-factored code base if you want to be fast and flexible. His hobbies are studies in lean production and quality management and, of course, programming.

Bas is also one of the authors of the CppUTest unit test framework for C/C++ and of Osaka a Mac UI automation framework written in Ruby.