Toward Measuring the Success of Communities of Practice in Large-Scale Agile Software Development

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. Several scaling agile frameworks and researchers propose using Communities of Practice (CoPs), groups of experts that have a common interest in a specific topic and meet regularly to exchange and learn about this topic, to address the mentioned issues. However, even though it is a topic relevant for many practitioners, how the success of CoPs can be measured has barely been considered so far. 

Therefore, this thesis tries to fill this gap by investigating how the success of CoPs in large-scale agile organizations can be measured. To achieve these goals, a literature review of scientific and gray literature, the analysis of already conducted expert interviews, and/or a survey are performed. 

Research Questions: 

RQ1: What are the existing approaches to assessing the success of CoPs* in the context of Large-Scale Agile Software Development, Agile Software Development, and General Organizational Setting?

RQ2: What traditional group structures within organizations are similar to the CoPs* in the context of Large-Scale Agile Software Development and how has their success been assessed?

RQ3: How could a novel approach to assessing the success of the CoPs* in the context of Large-Scale Agile Software Development be designed?

*Based on Taxonomy of CoP