Coordinating Knowledge Work in Multi-Team Programs: Findings from a Large-Scale Agile Development Program

Software development projects have undergone remarkable changes with the arrival of agile development methods. While intended for small, self-managing teams, these methods are increasingly used also for large development programs. A major challenge in programs is to coordinate the work of many teams, due to high uncertainty in tasks, a high degree of interdependence between tasks and because of the large number of people involved. This revelatory case study focuses on how knowledge work is coordinated in large-scale agile development programs by providing a rich description of the coordination practices used and how these practices change over time in a four year development program with 12 development teams. The main findings highlight the role of coordination modes based on feedback, the use of a number of mechanisms far beyond what is described in practitioner advice, and finally how coordination practices change over time. The findings are important to improve the outcome of large knowledge-based development programs by tailoring coordination practices to needs and ensuring adjustment over time.Comment: To appear in Project Management Journa

Non-Technical Individual Skills are Weakly Connected to the Maturity of Agile Practices

Context: Existing knowledge in agile software development suggests that individual competency (e.g. skills) is a critical success factor for agile projects. While assuming that technical skills are important for every kind of software development project, many researchers suggest that non-technical individual skills are especially important in agile software development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate whether non-technical individual skills can predict the use of agile practices. Method: Through creating a set of multiple linear regression models using a total of 113 participants from agile teams in six software development organizations from The Netherlands and Brazil, we analyzed the predictive power of non-technical individual skills in relation to agile practices. Results: The results show that there is surprisingly low power in using non-technical individual skills to predict (i.e. explain variance in) the mature use of agile practices in software development. Conclusions: Therefore, we conclude that looking at non-technical individual skills is not the optimal level of analysis when trying to understand, and explain, the mature use of agile practices in the software development context. We argue that it is more important to focus on the non-technical skills as a team-level capacity instead of assuring that all individuals possess such skills when understanding the use of the agile practices.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Enhancing security incident response follow-up efforts with lightweight agile retrospectives

Security incidents detected by organizations are escalating in both scale and complexity. As a result, security incident response has become a critical mechanism for organizations in an effort to minimize the damage from security incidents. The final phase within many security incident response approaches is the feedback/follow-up phase. It is within this phase that an organization is expected to use information collected during an investigation in order to learn from an incident, improve its security incident response process and positively impact the wider security environment. However, recent research and security incident reports argue that organizations find it difficult to learn from incidents. A contributing factor to this learning deficiency is that industry focused security incident response approaches, typically, provide very little practical information about tools or techniques that can be used to extract lessons learned from an investigation. As a result, organizations focus on improving technical security controls and not examining or reassessing the effectiveness or efficiency of internal policies and procedures. An additional hindrance, to encouraging improvement assessments, is the absence of tools and/or techniques that organizations can implement to evaluate the impact of implemented enhancements in the wider organization. Hence, this research investigates the integration of lightweight agile retrospectives and meta-retrospectives, in a security incident response process, to enhance feedback and/or follow-up efforts. The research contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents an approach based on lightweight retrospectives as a means of enhancing security incident response follow-up efforts. Second, it presents an empirical evaluation of this lightweight approach in a Fortune 500 Financial organization's security incident response team

Learning in the Large - An Exploratory Study of Retrospectives in Large-Scale Agile Development

Many see retrospectives as the most important practice of agile software development. Previous studies of retrospectives have focused on pro- cess and outcome at team level. In this article, we study how a large-scale agile development project uses retrospectives through an analysis of retrospective reports identifying a total of 109 issues and 36 action items as a part of a longitudinal case study. We find that most of the issues identified relate to team-level learning and improvement, and discuss these findings in relation to current advice to improve learning outcome in large-scale agile development.Learning in the Large - An Exploratory Study of Retrospectives in Large-Scale Agile DevelopmentpublishedVersio

Uppskalning av agil systemutveckling: en flerfallstudie av ramverket Scaled Agile Framework

Agile software development methods have been extensively studied in the context for which they were originally developed: small, collocated and cross-functional teams. The proven benefits of agile methods have caused larger organizations and programs to take an interest in them, although adopting such methods at large is far more challenging. Several frameworks for adopting agile methods in a larger context exist but research surrounding them is scarce, consisting almost entirely of industry-produced experience reports. In this thesis we have studied the adoption of a popular scaling framework, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), in two Finnish companies: Comptel, a telecom company; and NAPA, a company specialized in ship design and operation software. We sought to understand why these organizations chose to adopt SAFe, how they did it, what successes and challenges related to the adoptions the organizations encountered, and what effects the adoptions had. We reviewed existing literature in order to find out why and how other organizations had adopted SAFe. Using the results of the review we constructed a set of questions which we used in 16 interviews at the case organizations. The interviews spanned all organizational layers of SAFe: we interviewed people from leadership, middle management, and teams. The results of the interviews support many of the findings of the literature review, showing that planning the adoption in detail, training key personnel, and putting significant effort into the first planning session are key success factors in adopting SAFe. The interviews also showed that internal drivers of change are vital in establishing support for the adoption. Our results indicate that SAFe is a viable option for scaling agile software development, potentially improving visibility, collaboration and alignment.Agila systemutvecklingsmetoder blir allt vanligare och har studerats extensivt i den kontext för vilken de ursprungligen utformats: små självorganiserande och samordnade team. De påvisade fördelarna med agila metoder leder allt fler och större organisationer till att försöka implementera dem---dock växer svårighetsgraden i takt med organisationsstorleken. Ett flertal ramverk för uppskalning av agila metoder existerar, men akademisk forskning kring ämnet saknas nästan helt då majoriteten av litteraturen är fallstudier av varierande kvalité. I detta diplomarbete har vi studerat ibruktagningarna av det populära ramverket Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) i två finska företag: Comptel, ett globalt telekommunikationsföretag; och NAPA, ett företag specialiserat på mjukvara för formgivning och anförande av fartyg. Vi ville förstå varför företagen valt att ibrukta SAFe, hur de gjort det, vilka problem och framgångsfaktorer de stötte på, samt vilka effekter ibruktaganden hade. Vi undersökte den existerande litteraturen för att få preliminära svar på de ovannämnda frågorna, och skapade en serie intervjufrågor på basis av resultaten. Dessa brukade vi i 16 intervjuer vid fallföretagen, där vi intervjuade ledare, mellanchefer samt medlemmar av team i ett försök att täcka alla de lager av organisationen som även SAFe täcker. Intervjuresultaten stöder många av litteraturstudiens resultat: noggrant planerande av ibruktagningen, utbildning av nyckelroller, samt en storsatsning på det första planeringstillfället är viktiga framgångsfaktorer för ibruktagandet. Intervjuerna visade också att interna pådrivare av förändringen är essentiella för att samla stöd för ibruktagandet. Våra resultat tyder på att SAFe är ett genomförbart alternativ för att uppskala agil systemutveckling, då det kan medföra ökad synlighet, ökat samarbete samt bättre anslutning mot ett gemensamt mål

The Perceived Impact of the Agile Development and Project Management Method Scrum on Team Leadership in Information Systems Development

This research contributes to the body of knowledge in information systems development (ISD) with an empirical investigation in the form of a case study that demonstrates the positive impact of the agile development and project management method Scrum on team leadership in information systems and software development projects. It also provides a useful operationalization of the concept through six identified indicators for team leadership. Despite the fact that the case unit had challenges with the use of Scrum, the indicators identified the areas where the company had managed to exploit the potential of Scrum and its practices with regard to increasing team leadership. The research results are discussed with regard to the existing Scrum literature and briefly related to complex adaptive systems (CAS) as a foundation for ISD and agile developmen

Innovative Development of a Cross-Center Timeline Planning Tool

The Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) supports planning, coordination and scheduling of science activities for the International Space Station (ISS) in coordination with other NASA centers, international partners, and payload developers. The ability to efficiently plan and re-plan in response to change is critical to the flight planning teams. With the achievement of supporting a fourth crew member aboard the ISS and an increasing amount of payload science activities, came the need for a dynamic, more efficient way of building timeline planning reports that could be readily updated as fast as payload science plans could change. This paper addresses software architecture considerations in the successful cross-center development of an automated planning tool with multiple data sources. It also discusses the practical implementation of a time-boxed, hybrid Agile Software Development (ASD) approach to deliver customer-driven value despite changing requirements with respect to low-Earth orbit operational planning activities. The goal of this paper is to open discussion with members of the international community and trade effective strategies for cross-center architectural and customer-developer driven collaborations, to support increasing utilization of planning and conducting science activities in space