Assessing the Adoption of Scaled Agile in an Industrial Setting

Abstract

Even before the term ”agile methodology” was coined, methodologies and frameworks towards improving the software development process have been discussed and adopted by many practitioners. Following the introduction, as the success and the popularity of the agile methodology has increased, large organizations started investigating the methodology at a larger scale. Also, it is known that the software development process is an inherently complex activity and this complexity is positively correlated with the number of stakeholders involved in the process. Therefore, for large organizations, both actively managing this complexity and being able to adopt new methodologies are success critical. On top of that, changing technologies, market demand and customer needs introduce some level of uncertainty to the software development. The complexity and uncertainty make it virtually unrealistic to precisely plan software development processes for longer periods. Naturally, in order to actively manage this complexity and uncertainty, organizations evaluate methodologies so that they can improve on their processes easier. However, it is evident that there is no silver bullet in this domain as well. Once such methodologies are discovered to be potentially helpful for organizations, they start experimenting with these methodologies and measuring the outcomes so that they can optimize these methodologies specifically for their own needs. Because these organizations are ultimately looking for opportunities for improvements in their processes, evaluating their success in adopting such methodologies, identifying the factors for objective assessments are highly relevant. On the other hand, organizations need to know their current state with the adoption process in order to manage the adoption. The maturity model concept serves this need of an organization as it is helpful for identifying pain points in the inspected processes and for picturing the current state. There are already number of maturity models developed within the domain of agile software development. This thesis intends to introduce a practically guiding maturity model that bases its roots both on the literature as well as on industry requirements. The maturity model we are proposing is a model for assessing the adoption of scaled agile for organizations. The proposed maturity model consists of six categories. For each category, there exists five different maturity levels: Discovering, Experimenting, Measuring, Optimizing and Mastering. Maturity levels are representing the states of an organization with respect to the defined categories. Each of these levels are designed to be a building block on their predecessor, whereas the categories set different context for the evolution of these levels.

Research Questions

1- What are important categories for assessing the success level of scaled agility adoption?

2- How to design a maturity model that can be used as a guideline by large organizations to adopt scaled agility and assess the success level of their scaled agility adoptions?

3- What are the characteristics of mature and successful scaled agility adoptions at the corporate level?