Master's Thesis Anil Can Kara

Today, rapid changes in technology, markets, and customer needs force companies to react quickly to remain competitive. In our digital world, software development, in particular, is affected by the demand for agility, leading to the success of agile methods such as Scrum. Inspired by the success of agile practices in small projects of individual teams, organizations have started to apply them in a larger context: for more complex products, in projects with multiple teams and programs, and across the entire organization.

However, the complexity of scaling agile practices and the new organizational structure, including moving to cross-functional teams, lead to challenges. Examples include efficient cross-team (or even cross-program) coordination and knowledge sharing between units of the agile organization (e.g., teams, programs, business, IT areas) and adequate handling of cross-cutting issues. Dependencies should be considered, redundant work and silo building avoided, common methods and guidelines followed, and knowledge and experience shared.

These demands require suitable knowledge exchange and coordination concepts that preserve the agile organizational structure and basic principles of agile methods, such as (team) autonomy. Although some researchers have covered the topic of knowledge exchange and coordination in large-scale agile development organizations, they mainly focused on what means for these purposes exist in individual case organizations or investigated specific ones in detail. However, a broad overview of what kind of mechanisms are used to share knowledge and coordinate in scaled agile environments, what hinders and is required to make an effective knowledge exchange and coordination possible, as well as what kind of mechanisms can be suitable for organizations, has not been investigated so far.

Therefore, this thesis tries to fill this gap by investigating what organizational structures and means exist for knowledge exchange and coordination in large agile organizations. Further, barriers to and requirements for effective knowledge sharing and coordination in that context are identified. Finally, organizational structures and means for knowledge sharing and coordination suitable to the large-scale agile context and their prerequisites should be identified. To achieve these goals, a literature review, expert interviews, and/or a survey are performed. 

Research Questions

RQ1: How do knowledge exchange and coordination take place in large agile organizations, and which organizational structures and means are used for this purpose?

RQ2: What are the barriers to and requirements for effective knowledge sharing and coordination in large agile organizations?

RQ3: What are the benefits, trade-offs, and application contexts of the organizational structures and means of knowledge exchange and coordination in large agile organizations?