Motivation

With the success of agile methods for small teams, big organizations become more and more interested in applying these methods to large teams. While small teams already face a variety of challenges coming with agile methods, there are even more impediments to overcome in large-scale agile methods, such as Large-Scale Scrum or Extreme Programming. One example is the location of team members, as small teams are mostly located in the same office, while large teams may be separated onto different continents. As a consequence, the teams are facing communication problems, e.g. unreliable internet connection during phone calls or organizing meetings in several time zones.

This is the reason why many big organizations struggle with applying agile methods while they’ve become a standard for small companies and start-ups already. The outcome is an even bigger difference in time-to-market between small and big organizations. If big organizations manage the transition to a full agile work environment, they could focus more on their actual business and reduce the number of administrational tasks.

Since every stakeholder of an agile project has different challenges, the amount of challenges and possible solutions is wide. Hence, there is a demand to find out recurring challenges of all groups of stakeholders and document relevant solutions to these challenges. 

Goal

The goal of this thesis is to observe challenges and best practices of Product Managers and Product Owners in a large-scale agile development and to document them in a defined pattern language.

The information for each pattern will be gathered in interviews with industry partners. They will identify challenges they face when applying large-scale agile methods. Furthermore, they will explain their solution to these challenges. In order to ensure a certain comparability, the interviews will be conducted in a structured way. 

As an overall goal for this project all other stakeholders in large-scale agile development will be interviewed as well to gain a variety of patterns. All these patterns will result in a pattern catalog for best practices.

Research Questions 

1. What are recurring concerns of Product Managers and Product Owners in Large-Scale Agile Development?
2. What are best practices for addressing recurring concerns of Product Managers and Product Owners in Large-Scale Agile Development?

3. Which anti-patterns should Product Managers and Product Owners avoid in large-scale agile development?

Sources