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Achieving effective inter-team coordination is one of the most pressing challenges in large-scale software development. Hybrid approaches of traditional and agile development promise combining the overview and predictability of long-term planning on inter-team level with the flexibility and adaptability of agile development on team level. It is cur...
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Scrum, the most popular agile method and project management framework, is widely reported to be used, adapted, misused, and abused in practice. However, not much is known about how Scrum actually works in practice, and critically, where, when, how and why it diverges from Scrum by the book. Through a Grounded Theory study involving semi-structured...
![Fig. 1. Waterfall model [12].](profile/Norzariyah_Yahya/publication/365336966/figure/fig1/AS:11431281113513531@1673942120434/Waterfall-model-12_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 1. Scrum framework [14]](publication/368885189/figure/fig1/AS:11431281123485907@1677729171123/Scrum-framework-14_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 2. Waterfall model [23]](publication/368885189/figure/fig2/AS:11431281123522463@1677729171180/Waterfall-model-23_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 3. Scrumfall model [6]](publication/368885189/figure/fig3/AS:11431281123532106@1677729171215/Scrumfall-model-6_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 4. Blending scrum and waterfall model [5]](publication/368885189/figure/fig4/AS:11431281123532107@1677729171349/Blending-scrum-and-waterfall-model-5_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 5. Hybrid approaches [3]](publication/368885189/figure/fig5/AS:11431281123496991@1677729171391/Hybrid-approaches-3_Q320.jpg)
span lang="EN-US">The combination of scrum and waterfall is one of the software engineering teams that preferred hybrid agile models. The purpose of combining the two models is to leverage the advantages of each also to tailor the hybrid agile model to the needs of the project. However, to what extent are the phases, stages, and features of scrum a...
Citations
... One main failure is the misalignment between the development teams and stakeholders [22]. Although Agile promotes constant cross communication and intentional check-ins with customers these meetings can turn into conversations on additional requirements added to the initial task, i.e., scope creep. ...
Agile Development has been an integral part of project management and product development since its formal introduction by the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Subsequently, Agile has rapidly gained in popularity, leading to significant improvements in on-time delivery and managing costs, as well as successful delivery of the required scope for information systems (IS) projects. Agile has even moved beyond the IS domain into other business applications. This success may be tempered somewhat by the gaps in the Agile Development process that still exist, such as a lack of complete understanding of the process or the culture changes necessary to achieve larger benefits and the complexity of integrating Agile-developed products into existing IT infrastructure. However, there is also great promise in extending Agile by incorporating new tools and concepts and applying Agile development to novel and emerging problem domains. This paper proposes a Framework for Agile Development that can be used to explore existing results from Agile development, as well as to identify future possibilities and emphasize the importance of teaching Agile development in order for it to have further influence on practice.
... Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, have revolutionized the software development industry by emphasizing team autonomy, flexibility, collaboration, and iterative development [2,4]. However, as software products have grown in size and complexity, it has become desirable to scale agile practices beyond individual teams. ...
In the last decade, various scalable agile frameworks have emerged to scale the benefits of agility to wider organizational levels and have become increasingly popular in practice. However, the variety of frameworks has not been widely understood yet. The aim of this paper is to provide a well-organized understanding of the primary dimensions and characteristics of these frameworks. To this end, a taxonomy for scaling agile frameworks was created utilising a systematic method for taxonomy development. The basis for the formal and content-related creation of the taxonomy is a systematic and focused literature review, followed by a qualitative text analysis to extract key framework characteristics, concentrating on the four agile scaling frameworks Scaled Agile Framework, Large-Scale Scrum, Disciplined Agile Delivery and Scrum@Scale. For the validation of the proposed taxonomy, an exemplary categorisation of 2 frameworks in the taxonomy was performed. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering • Software creation and management • Software development process management • Software development methods • Agile software development
... Effective coordination of work within large-scale agile software engineering is key to project success, and researchers have addressed topics related to leadership, organizational context, design of teams, autonomy, and team processes [7,13]. Further, team autonomy must be balanced with the larger organizational structures because of a need for alignment between the system, the organization, and the product [5,6,15]. Challenges in large-scale agile include integrating non-development functions, change resistance, stakeholder management and keeping to the agile principles [6,8,9]. ...
Currently, many financial organizations must undergo a digital transformation. In this study, we investigated a transformation in a Norwegian fintech company with the aim of understanding how the tasks performed by business development can be better aligned with the work of cross-functional development teams. Specifically, we examined the enablers and barriers to coordination between business development and software product development in large-scale agile software development. The organization under study had 25 software product development teams that followed an in-house agile model. We collected data by conducting 13 interviews and collecting various documents. Our findings suggest that having cross-functional fora, having a common understanding of what business development is, and coaching the whole organization to be more agile can improve coordination between business and software development.
... The lowest mean value (M=3.8) was observed when the respondents were expected to have thorough procedures for agreeing on the task objectives and planning them. Lacking this could affect group interactions, as according to Bick et al. (2017), the group's planning activities should be aligned across levels to improve dependency awareness and, in turn, achieve more effective coordination. Thus, the norming stage very often had an influence on learners' group interactions. ...
... The lowest mean value (M=3.8) was observed when the respondents were expected to have thorough procedures for agreeing on the task objectives and planning them. Lacking this could affect group interactions, as according to Bick et al. (2017), the group's planning activities should be aligned across levels to improve dependency awareness and, in turn, achieve more effective coordination. Thus, the norming stage very often had an influence on learners' group interactions. ...
... As is generally the case, different team leaders in our study chose to exert different degrees of LMX differentiation. Whereas some software vendors enforce the use of specific ISD methods or even single ISD practices top-down (Bick et al., 2018;Ramasubbu et al., 2015), this company did not impose such constraints. Instead, the ISD teams had the autonomy to decide on the ISD method and practices that they used and how they applied them. ...
Prior work on leadership in information systems development (ISD) teams has assumed that all developers are treated equally by their team leader and ignored the possibility that differentiated leader-member exchange (LMX) may be an important instrument for team leaders to influence self-organizing, agile ISD teams. We conducted a concurrent mixed methods inquiry to understand how LMX differentiation is associated with developer satisfaction in agile ISD teams and through which team processes agile ISD teams address LMX differentiation. We ran a multilevel, multistage survey of 1,894 software developers in 217 teams and an embedded case study of five ISD teams drawing on qualitative data from 40 interviews of developers and team leaders. Two focus groups (one with 10 developers and one with 10 team leaders) helped to substantiate the meta-inferences from the quantitative and qualitative studies. The results showed that LMX differentiation was positively associated with developer satisfaction, especially in teams with high-quality team-member exchange (TMX). We identify three team processes (i.e., collectivization of resources, visible appreciation of privileges, and freeing up leader capacities) that are enacted through agile ISD practices and allow ISD teams to leverage benefits from LMX differentiation for all their members.
... A recent study separates first-and second-generation large-scale agile development methods (Dingsøyr et al. 2022). First-generation methods are described as development methods that combine agile and traditional methods, typically using agile at the team level and traditional project management practices used at the inter-team, project, or organizational level (e.g., Batra et al. 2010;Bick et al. 2018). Many organizations use this type of mix between agile practices and other project management practices because large-scale organizations (need to) have other governance structures surrounding the development and other agile business activities (Kalenda et al. 2018;Edison et al. 2022). ...
... As such, at Entur, it seemed that change events and the program's growth were closely associated and that both led to a continuous change in coordination needs. In this sense, our findings underscore the importance of dependency awareness in the face of change (Bick et al. 2018), as the ability to sense and respond to changing coordination needs requires understanding how dependencies change. ...
... Our study also provides examples of how to adapt when existing coordination mechanisms do not work effectively (Strode et al. 2012;Strode 2016;Bick et al. 2018). Both the example of adjusting the product owners' prioritization meeting and the need to pay attention to keeping the team-leader stand-up meeting relevant across teams illustrate this. ...
Context
Responding to change and continuously improving processes, practices, and products are core to agile software development. It is no different in large-scale agile, where multiple software development teams need to respond both to changes in their external environments and to changes within the organization.
Objective
With this study, we aim to advance knowledge on coordination in large-scale agile by developing a model of the types of organizational changes that influence coordination mechanisms.
Method
We conducted a longitudinal case study in a growing large-scale agile organization, focusing on how external and internal changes impact coordination over time. We collected our data through 62 days of fieldwork across one and a half years. We conducted 37 interviews, observed 118 meetings at all organizational levels, collected supplementary material such as chat logs and presentations, and analyzed the data using thematic analysis.
Results
Our findings demonstrate how external events, such as onboarding new clients, and internal events, such as changes in the team organization, influence coordination mechanisms in the large-scale software development program. We find that external and internal change events lead to the introduction of new coordination mechanisms, or the adjustment of existing ones. Further, we find that continuous scaling requires continuous change and adjustment. Finally, we find that having the right mechanisms in place at the right time strengthens resilience and the ability to cope with change in coordination needs in complex large-scale environments.
Conclusions
Our findings are summarized in an empirically based model that provides a practical approach to analyzing change, aimed at supporting both researchers and practitioners dealing with change in coordination mechanisms in large-scale agile development contexts.
... Despite this popularity, there are challenges associated with large-scale agile, including implementing agile methods at large scale, lack of organizational support and clashes between agile teams and more hierarchical organizational structures Palopak et al., 2023). These and other challenges stem from the increased complexity that follows large software systems and large development organizations, and the unavoidable coordination required when many teams work together towards a common development goal (Bick et al., 2018;Dikert et al., 2016;. Accordingly, coordination in largescale agile has become an important research topic. ...
... Typical elements present in a large-scale setting include agile meetings such as stand-up meetings (Stray et al., 2018), sprint planning, and retrospectives (Andriyani et al., 2017;Przybyłek et al., 2022), agile roles such as the Scrum master (Shastri et al., 2021a; and product owner (Bass, 2015;Paasivaara et al., 2012), and agile tools and artifacts such as program backlogs, wiki's . In addition, various other management practices and elements are commonly used Bick et al., 2018;, such as the project manager role (Shastri et al., 2021b), the key performance indicator metric, and risk management tools and communication tools like Slack , to name a few. Some authors refer to this mixing of agile and non-agile practices as 'hybrid' large-scale agile, or similar terms, to describe situations where agile practices are used alongside more traditional practices (Bick et al., 2018;. ...
... In addition, various other management practices and elements are commonly used Bick et al., 2018;, such as the project manager role (Shastri et al., 2021b), the key performance indicator metric, and risk management tools and communication tools like Slack , to name a few. Some authors refer to this mixing of agile and non-agile practices as 'hybrid' large-scale agile, or similar terms, to describe situations where agile practices are used alongside more traditional practices (Bick et al., 2018;. Because of the many and varied approaches to large-scale agile that exist, in this thesis, I use the term large-scale agile in a broad sense to refer to the use of agile methods and practices, as well as other management practices, in a multi-team setting where teams need to coordinate to deliver software. ...
Large-scale agile software development is characterized by the need to coordinate dependencies within and between teams using various coordination mechanisms. Research on large-scale agile has identified and described many coordination mechanisms, but until now there has not been a structured approach to identifying and describing mechanisms, their characteristics, and how they may change over time. This dissertation presents an overview of 47 coordination mechanisms used in a large-scale agile Norwegian development program and presents the development of the Framework for Analyzing Large-scale agile Coordination mechanisms (FALC). FALC is developed from longitudinal fieldwork including the observation of more than a hundred meetings and 37 interviews and consists of 1) a taxonomy of inter-team coordination mechanisms including meetings, roles, and tools and artefacts, 2) a framework for analyzing the mechanisms’ technical, organizational, social, and physical characteristics, and 3) a practical approach to analyzing change in coordination mechanisms. FALC is designed to be context-sensitive and is intended for both researchers and practitioners in understanding and selecting mechanisms across organizational contexts. By this, the Ph.D. thesis advances knowledge on coordination in large-scale agile, with the goal of contributing to successful agile software development and continuous value delivery in large-scale settings.
... Often, the approach of combining traditional and agile aspects is called hybrid. Similar to agile approaches, there is no single hybrid approach to software development but numerous variations: organizations are free to choose which underlying assumptions, methods, practices, or roles they adopt from either traditional or agile concepts (Bick et al., 2018). ...
Agile transformations cause fundamental changes to work designs. To better understand resistance to transformations, we shed light on employee preferences and the consequences of team and work organization changes for job satisfaction. Using the stated preference method "pairwise comparison-based preference measurement", we examine our hypothesis on job satisfaction in agile vs. traditional team and work organization. Furthermore, we relate job satisfaction to the gap between perceived and preferred forms of such organizations. In summary, we identified team organization as the most important dimension in agile transformations. For requirements engineering, the distance between employee preferences and the perceived status quo was particularly large. Further, we found evidence that a larger distance between team and work organization preferences and perceptions negatively influenced job satisfaction.
... Often, the approach of combining traditional and agile aspects is called hybrid. Similar to agile approaches, there is no single hybrid approach to software development but numerous variations: organizations are free to choose which underlying assumptions, methods, practices, or roles they adopt from either traditional or agile concepts (Bick et al., 2018). ...
Retailers nowadays rely more and more on in-store analytics at the point of sale and have started installing technology that enables tracking customers during their shopping trips. Such data tracks the time spent in the store, which categories were visited for how long, and what had been purchased. Some retailers spend additional effort and complement shopping trip data with survey data to capture purchase intentions. With this research, we propose a hidden Markov model to condense the rich shopping trip data. We also examine the added value of the condensed data to inform unplanned purchases and purchase resignation, i.e., customers not making a purchase, even though they had purchase intentions when entering the store. Finally, we contrast its value to the added value of knowledge about customer characteristics and other behavioral information. Omitting in-store tracking variables in our field study degrades the model fit for unplanned purchases by 50.28% and purchase resignation by 14.58%. At the same time, omitting shopping motivation and customer characteristics account for just a 1.17 – 2.84% decrease in model fit.
