Agile methodologies emphasize change tolerance, collaboration, and the involvement of customers during the software development process. Since thesemethodologies prove to be successful for small, co-located team environments, large organizations aim to scale the underlying methods onto an enterprise-level to har- ness the same benefits, such as shorter time to market, and increased responsiveness to change. To support this agile transformation, a growing number of companies rely on scaling agile frameworks, e.g., Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) or Large- Scale Scrum (LeSS). Despite a growing attention from the industry and increasing amount of scientific research, literature investigating the reasons and motivation for companies to choose particular frameworks is still scarce. Also, there is no scientific literature focusing on the satisfaction with scaling agile frameworks. This paper aims to fill these gaps by providing a quantitative study analyzing the reasons to choose specific scaling agile frameworks and the fulfillment of expectations. We collected and statistically analyzed data from more than 20 countries, including USA, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, Japan, and New Zealand. Our sample indicates that 75.4% of survey participants are satisfied with their framework. Contrary to existing expectations in literature, we could not confirm that wide adoption is the primary reason for organizations to adopt scaling agile frameworks. We divided the sample data into different groups depending on organizational characteristics, e.g. size of development organization, distribution of teams and development sites. Using inferential analysis we compared different sizes of development organiza- tions and found that there is no significant difference regarding the agreement towards documentation or support as relevant framework selection reasons. Also, respondents where more organizational areas were included within the scaling agile framework were significantly more satisfied than organizations that included less areas. SAFe and LeSS practitioners agreed significantly more with documentation and definition, and available support (e.g., training, coaching, and certifications) of frameworks being relevant for framework selection than organizations that used Spotify or internally created frameworks.

Despite the fact that there is a rising interest in adopting scaling agile frame- works, scientific literature providing empirical evidence on the reasons and satisfac- tion with adopting scaling agile frameworks is still scarce [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. Also, there is a lack of literature comparing the adoption of different scaling agile frameworks.

Existing research predominantly consists of literature reviews and in-depth case studies considering selected scaling agile frameworks at a limited number of organizations. We were wondering if there is any empirical evidence proving that particular scaling agile frameworks are chosen over others due to specific reasons. Furthermore, we were interested in understanding what practitioners anticipated before they introduced scaling agile frameworks. For this purpose, we decided to conduct a survey as this is the best way to collect information from a broad population [7]. The survey aims to uncover the underlying reasons for scaling agile framework adoptions, as well as the fulfillment of expectations across different enterprise contexts.