Sebis Research News

Abstract: Over the past two decades, agile methods have transformed and brought unique changes to software development practice by strongly emphasizing team collaboration, customer involvement, and change tolerance. The success of agile methods for small, co-located teams has inspired organizations to increasingly use them on a larger scale to build complex software systems. The scaling of agile methods poses new challenges such as inter-team coordination, dependencies to other existing environments or distribution of work without a defined architecture. The latter is also the reason why large-scale agile development has been subject to criticism since it neglects detailed assistance on software architecting. Although there is a growing body of literature on large-scale agile development, literature documenting the collaboration between architects and agile teams in such development efforts is still scarce. As little research has been conducted on this issue, this paper aims to fill this gap by providing a case study of a German consumer electronics retailer's large-scale agile development program. Based on social network analysis, this study describes the collaboration between architects and agile teams in terms of architecture sharing.

Abstract: Over the last two decades, agile methods have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their software development processes. In contrast to traditional methods, agile methods place more emphasis on flexible processes than on detailed upfront plans and heavy documentation. Since agile methods have proved to be successful at the team level, large organizations are now aiming to scale agile methods to the enterprise level by adopting and applying so-called scaling agile frameworks such as Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) or Scaled Agile Framework. Although there is a growing body of literature on large-scale agile development, literature documenting actual experiences related to scaling agile frameworks is still scarce. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a case study on the adoption and application of LeSS in four different products of a German automobile manufacturer. Based on seven interviews, we present how the organization adopted and applied LeSS, and discuss related challenges and success factors. The comparison of the products indicates that transparency, training courses and workshops, and change management are crucial for a successful adoption. We also draw attention to the integration of IT and business people in LeSS from a sociological perspective. Our findings show that LeSS promotes (social) integration mechanisms such as co-location, personnel movement, cross-functional teams, and formal integrative management processes which have a significant impact on product performance.