Guided Research Christoph Caprano

Identifizierung und Strukturierung von Herausforderungen bei der Einführung von agilen und lean Praktiken in großen Organisationen basierend auf eine Literaturanalyse

Abstract

Over the last 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 apply agile practices to large-scale efforts. Since these methods are originally designed for small teams, unprecedented challenges occur when introducing them at larger scale, such as inter-team coordination and communication, dependencies with other organizational units or general resistances to changes. Compared to the rich body of agile software development literature describing typical challenges, recurring challenges of stakeholders and programs in large-scale agile development has not yet been studied through secondary studies sufficiently. With this paper, we aim to fill this gap by presenting a structured literature review on challenges in large-scale agile development. We identified 79 challenges grouped into eleven categories. The most conspicuous challenge categories were culture and mindset, software architecture, and project management.

Objectives

1. Which stakeholders exist in large-scale agile development endeavors?
2. What are challenges of stakeholders and programs
   in large-scale agile development efforts?
3. Which challenge categories are the most salient in large-scale agile development?
4. What are generalizable findings on stakeholder- and program-related challenges in large-scale agile development endeavors

Research method

The first part is a structured literature review where we extract relevant papers according to their abstract and title. After that, we insert these papers in the MAXQDA tool to code categories to relevant paper parts. Next, we refine these papers (e.g. finding duplicates) and finally, we analyse the relevant paper parts to get the stakeholder- and projectspecific challenges.

Literature