Master's Thesis Sascha Nägele

Participatory establishment of guidelines through gamification and automated testing in large-scale agile software development

Abstract

Nowadays, large IT organizations are struggling to cope with unpredictable competitive environments due to rapidly changing customer needs, regulatory changes, and technological advancements. Thus, the ability of large IT organizations to react quickly to changes can be a significant competitive advantage. 

To achieve a high level of organization-wide agility, standardized processes and commitment from all stakeholders are necessary. Traditionally, top-down IT-governance control mechanisms have been used to enforce a certain common direction within IT-processes, thereby also aiming to achieve consistency and quality as well as to ensure compliance with legal requirements.
However, these top-down control mechanisms do not fit well into increasingly widespread agile and lean environments. Scaling agile frameworks, such as Scaled Agile Framework or Disciplined Agile Delivery, recommend to use more lightweight and collaborative IT governance approaches. Yet, these frameworks do not provide enough concrete guidance to implement such a form of IT governance on a large scale.

We fill this gap by providing a collaborative approach to establish architecture principles and guidelines and a web application to enable and support the approach. The approach mainly revolves around a close collaboration between enterprise architects and agile teams, handling the full life cycle of architecture principles and guidelines together. The goal is to combine top-down (authoritarian) and bottom-up (self-governance) perspectives in order to leverage the advantages as well as mitigate the disadvantages of both sides.

To accomplish this, the thesis first analyzes the current state of existing research on how governance and architecture fit into modern, large-scale agile environments. Afterwards, it first presents the results of a case study involving a large global insurance company and then introduces the collaborative approach and tool support that aim to solve challenges identified in both research and practice. Subsequently, we evaluate the two solution artifacts of this thesis, the collaborative approach and the tool support, in expert interviews with fifteen participants from the case study organization.
Finally, we summarize the key findings and give an outlook on possible further research. The results indicate a high approval for the approach and the tool support as well as a strong need for closer collaboration between both stakeholder groups, the enterprise architects and the agile teams.