At the BMC Software, Inc. Austin campus (one of my former employers), I talk with Israel Gat about introducing and then benefiting from Agile Software development at BMC. The projects under Israel are each “enterprise software” and peopled with large teams. Thus, his experience and the lessons learned from introducing Agile on such a large scale are interesting to hear. To sum up, he says “the most important thing is staying out of the way,” followed by internal and external evangelism. Once the teams are sold on the idea, they just need the corporate leeway to mold Agile development to their work.

Additionally, Israel talks with me about a few new ideas BMC has for benefiting from Agile: introducing more customization for customers (while incorporating them back into the main release) and adapting the rapid releases to the longer enterprise sales cycles.