Master's Thesis Pascal Philipp

Investigating the Current State of Research in Large-Scale Agile Software Development:
A Systematic Mapping Study  

Contemporary organizations operate in an environment that is subject to constant change. Methods used in agile software development empower IT organizations to cope with the challenges of today’s fast-paced business and technology environment. However, these development methodologies are designed for small, co-located, and self-organizing teams that produce software in close collaboration with business customers, utilizing regular feedback and rapid development iterations. The successful application of agile methods in small, co-located, and self-organizing teams inspired companies to use agile practices in large-scale projects. Hence, the first frameworks to support companies in scaling agile practices such as LeSS, SAFe, Spotify, and RAGE already exist and are increasingly used in large-scale agile settings. Simultaneously to the increasing popularity of large-scale agile development in industry, the popularity of the topic in science also increased. The studies published so far are mostly primary studies since there are only a few secondary studies on the topic. A continually increasing number of primary studies is an indicator that secondary studies can be conducted henceforth, to facilitate the aggregation of results of the primary studies. One type of secondary studies are Systematic Mapping Studies (SMSs) which are very well suited to give an overview of a field of research. Since within the field no SMS is conducted yet, this thesis aims to close this research gap by carrying out a SMS to reflect the current state of research activities in the field of large-scale agile development. The current state of the field will be determined in two phases. In the first phase, search engines will be searched, and the resulting studies are filtered to identify the relevant literature in the field. During the second phase, the selected studies from the first phase are used as input to perform a data extraction. During the systematic mapping, data is analyzed according to multiple dimensions. Finally, the key findings and promising future research directions are presented. The results show that the number of publications in the field of large-scale agile development has increased in recent years and that the field is gaining maturity because the number of publications in journals is rapidly growing. The most active research streams in the field are agile practices at scale and communication and coordination.