Managing Dependencies in Large-Scale Agile

… , location, location: Proceedings of the 23rd …, 2012

Dependencies in a software project can contribute to unsatisfactory progress if they constrain or block the flow of work. Various studies highlight the importance of dependencies in the organisation of work; however dependencies in agile software development projects have not previously been a research focus. Drawing on three case studies of agile software projects, and the IS literature, this paper develops an initial taxonomy of agile software project dependencies. Three distinct categories of dependency are found: task, resource, and knowledge dependencies. This paper contributes to theory by providing a taxonomy of dependency types occurring in the area of agile software development. Practitioners can use this taxonomy as sensitising device to ensure they consider dependencies they might face that could hinder their projects, enabling them to take appropriate and timely mitigating action.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2018

Agile methods are increasingly used in large development projects, with multiple development teams. A central question is then what is needed to coordinate feature teams efficiently. This study examines three mechanisms for coordination: Shared mental models, communication and trust in a large-scale development project with 12 feature teams running over a four-year period. We analyse the findings in relation to suggested frameworks for large-scale agile development and a theory on coordination, and provide new recommendations for practice and theory.

2022

Today, many large-scale software projects have members working from home, which has changed the way teams coordinate work. To better understand coordination in this setting, we conducted a case study through which we examined two teams in a large-scale agile project by observing meetings and conducting 17 interviews. Through the lens of Relational Coordination Theory (RCT), we analyzed the use of the goal-setting framework Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and the collaboration tool Slack. Slack was used for frequent, timely, and problem-solving communication and, and its use decreased the number of planned meetings. However, discussions often started on Slack and continued in virtual ad-hoc meetings. The use of OKRs facilitated knowledge sharing, helped the teams align their goals, and provided inter-team insights. The main implication of our research is that projects using OKRs need to support project members, especially in formulating the key results that align and motivate the t...

2019

The market environment and customer requirements are changing at an increasing pace. It is crucial that organizations remain competitive by embracing new challenges. These changes require different and more agile leadership, mindset and collaboration, including more team empowerment. With the constant increment of projects and programs, organizations have to adopt new methods to respond to the demands of the business environment. Large-scale agile approaches are the way. In this research, a literature review about Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Agile (LeSS) and Scrum of Scrums (SoS) was conducted, and an analysis of the collected material was made. The primary goal of this research was to understand why large-scale agile methods are used and how do they respond to the interdependences between teams. In this paper, we conclude that SAFe incorporates an enterprise focus similar to LeSS. LeSS is a framework which implicates extinction of roles, processes and artifacts, givi...

2019

This study investigates the practices of a development team that uses an Agile system of working where some team members and stakeholders were distributed geographically and temporally. The focus of the investigation was to study the dependencies and related coordination activities as the team collaborated on their work, which was the installation and customization of a complex Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software system in this case. We collected data by interviewing eight key team members and observing three team meetings over a 2-month period. We made detailed field notes and used thematic analysis to identify the key globally distributed dependencies in the development process. We identify and discuss the coordination mechanisms and tools that address these dependencies, along with the main coordination challenges. We conclude by discussing some ideas and lessons learned by the participants which we expect to be useful for other teams in a similar context.

Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016, 2016

We draw on Organizational Discontinuity Theory (ODT) to identify factors that increase communication and coordination problems between teams working on large software development projects. ODT posits that faced with a disruption in the expected flow of communication, called a discontinuity, individuals must make sense of the disruption to address the problem. They may be motivated to pay more attention to the situation and consider alternative actions to deal with the discontinuity, leading to the emergence of continuities, which are new behaviors, group practices and expectations. Continuities reduce or eliminate the attention and effort required to understand and manage the situation associated with problematic discontinuities. We propose a mixed-method study based on this model to examine the effects of discontinuities and the development of continuities on interteam coordination in large-scale agile software development. CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering➝Agile software development • Software and its engineering➝Programming teams

Information and Organization, 2020

Agile Software Development is characterized by collaborative social interactions and fast-paced and iterative changes in project requirements. Much of the extant Agile development literature focuses on team and organizational aspects of Agile development projects. However, coordination mechanisms used within Agile projects have received less attention. Particularly, existing research lacks a discussion on how artifacts are applied in Agile software development to support project coordination, and how their potential for information richness and mutability impact their ability to support coordination. To address these issues, we conducted a case study of an Agile development project that involved customer and vendor organizations. Our case follows the interactions between the two organizations, identifies the different types of artifacts that they utilized to coordinate their joint activities throughout the various phases of the project, and traces the enactment of these artifacts' informational potential. Our study reveals that the organizations applied four different types of coordination artifacts-Foundational, Projective, Exposition and Indicative artifacts-to address different coordination challenges that arose throughout the project. The four types of artifacts were characterized by varying levels of information richness and mutability, which were shaped to support the Agile activities within which they were used. Our study enriches the understanding of the role of coordination artifacts in Agile projects, provides insights on the informational potential of the artifacts, and highlights some of the pitfalls than can result from misunderstanding object use.

2021

Large-scale agile transformation implies that agile approaches are moving from standalone in-formation system development units such as teams towards being applied in more complex organi-sational settings with multiple and diverse units. Research on large-scale agile transformation suggests that agile methods with its focus on mutual adjustment increases interdependencies be-tween diverse units. However, extant empirical research on how interdependencies can be man-aged in large-scale agile transformations is scarce. We report from an interpretative case study of an agile transformation initiative in a company with 20.000 employees. Based on data from 32 interviews combined with participatory observation in retrospectives we analyse how “collabora-tion rooms” are used to manage the interdependence between heterogeneous units, and how the collaboration rooms are conceived by information systems development practitioners as an agile transformation initiative. Using the concept of trad...

2018

Coordination of teams is critical when managing large programmes that involve multiple teams. In large-scale software development, work is carried out simultaneously by many developers and development teams. Results are delivered frequently and iteratively, which requires coordination on different levels, e.g., the programme, project, and team levels. Prior studies of knowledge work indicate that such work relies heavily on coordination through "personal" modes such as mutual adjustment between individuals or through scheduled or unscheduled meetings. In agile software development processes, principles and work structures emerge during the project and are not predetermined. We studied how coordination through scheduled and unscheduled meetings changes over time in two large software development programmes relying on agile methods. Our findings include transitions from scheduled to unscheduled meetings and from unscheduled to scheduled meetings. The transitions have been in...

Agile software development offers a deceptively simple means to organise complex multi-participant software development while achieving fast delivery of quality software, meeting customer requirements, and coping effectively with project change.