Scaling Agile Methods

The purpose of this thesis was to give an impartial view on some of the prevailing scaling agile frameworks. As well as provide a general portrayal of how agile scaling is generally done and what it means. The thesis was compiled by reviewing material found online from various different individuals and resources. The thesis goes through the basic principle of scaling agile as well as few of the most prevailing frameworks supporting it. Chosen frameworks are also studied by reviewing case studies concerning them. The report showed that implementing a framework to scale agile might be challenging and often proper training and coaching is needed. The study also showed that frameworks have differences that need to be considered when choosing the one to implement. The report concludes that scaling agile already has and will continue to have an important role in software and product development. Some frameworks are better suited in some environments than others and some environments fit in multiple different frameworks.Tämän työn tarkoitus oli antaa puolueeton katsaus huomiota saaneisiin skaalautuviin ketteriin menetelmiin. Sekä tarjota yleiskuvaus siitä kuinka ketterän menetelmän skaalaus yleensä tehdään ja mitä se ylipäätään tarkoittaa. Työ on koostettu käymällä läpi usean eri henkilön ja resurssin julkaisemaa internetistä löytyvää materiaalia. Tutkimus selittää skaalautuvan ketterän mentelmän käsitteen sekä muutaman sitä tukevan viitekehyksen toimintaperiaatteen. Valittuja viitekehyksiä tutkittiin myös niihin liittyvien käytännön esimerkkitapausten kautta. Selvitys osoitti että skaalautuvan ketterän menetelmän käyttöönotto ja toteuttaminen voi olla haastavaa ja monesti oikeanlainen kouluttaminen ja valmentaminen on tarpeellista. Työ osoitti myös sen että viitekehyksillä on eroja, jotka pitää ottaa huomioon menetelmää valittaessa. Selvitys päättelee että skaalautuvat menetelmät ovat ja tulevat olemaan tärkeässä roolissa ohjelmisto- ja tuotekehityksessä. Jotkin viitekehykset soveltuvat paremmin joihinkin ympäristöihin kuin toiset ja jotkin ympäristöt sopivat moneen eri viitekehykseen

Do Agile Scaling Approaches Make A Difference? An Empirical Comparison of Team Effectiveness Across Popular Scaling Approaches

In the era of Agile methodologies, organizations are exploring strategies to scale development across teams. Various scaling strategies have emerged, from "SAFe" to "LeSS", with some organizations creating their own methods. Despite numerous studies on organizational challenges with these approaches, none have empirically compared their impact on Agile team effectiveness. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Agile teams using different scaling methods, focusing on factors like responsiveness, stakeholder satisfaction, and management approach. We surveyed 15,078 Agile team members and 1,841 stakeholders, followed by statistical analyses. The results showed minor differences in effectiveness across scaling strategies. In essence, the choice of scaling strategy does not significantly impact team effectiveness, and organizations should select based on their culture and management style

Challenges and Success Factors of Scaled Agile Adoption – A South African Perspective

Agile methods and Agile scaling frameworks have become a solution for software-developing organizations striving to improve the success of software projects. Agile methods were developed for small projects, but due to their benefits, even large software-developing organizations have adopted them to scale their software projects. This quantitative study was undertaken to deepen the researchers’ understanding of the critical success factors and challenges of Scaled Agile from the South African perspective. A simple random sampling method was used. Data was collected with the use of an online structured questionnaire and the response rate was 70%. The results reveal that customer satisfaction remains at the epicenter of adopting Scaled Agile methods. Lack of top management support remains the major challenge in adopting Scaled Agile. The results reveal some notable changes when it comes to the most adopted Agile scaling framework

Toward a Metric Catalog for Large-Scale Agile Development

Nowadays, organizations use agile software development to remain competitive in their frequently changing business environment. Inspired by the success of agile methods on a small scale, organizations have started to apply them in larger contexts. However, the limited scalability of agile methods is a problem. Metrics can be a success factor for achieving agility at scale, thus adopting them is promising. Most scaling agile frameworks provide few recommendations regarding metrics. Likewise, research on metrics in large-scale agile development lacks concrete guidance for metrics or their organization-specific adoption. To fill this gap, we propose two artifacts. We present the design of a minimalistic metric management fact sheet (MMFS) for large-scale agile development to support practitioners in using metrics in their organization-specific development environment. Furthermore, the MMFS is the basis for our metric catalog documenting 196 metrics identified in an expert study to provide a comprehensive metric set for scaling agile environments

Towards an Understanding of Scaling Frameworks and Business Agility: A Summary of the 6th International Workshop at XP2018

Large development projects and programs are conducted using agile development methods, with an increasing body of advice from practitioners and from research. This sixth workshop showed in increasing interest in scaling frameworks and in topics related to achieving business agility. This article summarizes four contributed papers, discussions in "open space" format and also presents a revised research agenda for large-scale agile development.Comment: Summary of workshop at XP201

Calibration of AGILE-GRID with In-Flight Data and Monte Carlo Simulations

Context: AGILE is a gamma-ray astrophysics mission which has been in orbit since 23 April 2007 and continues to operate reliably. The gamma-ray detector, AGILE-GRID, has observed Galactic and extragalactic sources, many of which were collected in the first AGILE Catalog. Aims: We present the calibration of the AGILE-GRID using in-flight data and Monte Carlo simulations, producing Instrument Response Functions (IRFs) for the effective area A_eff), Energy Dispersion Probability (EDP), and Point Spread Function (PSF), each as a function of incident direction in instrument coordinates and energy. Methods: We performed Monte Carlo simulations at different gamma-ray energies and incident angles, including background rejection filters and Kalman filter-based gamma-ray reconstruction. Long integrations of in-flight observations of the Vela, Crab and Geminga sources in broad and narrow energy bands were used to validate and improve the accuracy of the instrument response functions. Results: The weighted average PSFs as a function of spectra correspond well to the data for all sources and energy bands. Conclusions: Changes in the interpolation of the PSF from Monte Carlo data and in the procedure for construction of the energy-weighted effective areas have improved the correspondence between predicted and observed fluxes and spectra of celestial calibration sources, reducing false positives and obviating the need for post-hoc energy-dependent scaling factors. The new IRFs have been publicly available from the Agile Science Data Centre since November 25, 2011, while the changes in the analysis software will be distributed in an upcoming release

Agile at scale : a summary of the 8th International Workshop on Large-Scale Agile Development

The Large-Scale Agile Development workshop explored the main research challenges in large-scale software development. We considered multi-site organisations with large-scale projects that include a large number of teams adopting agile methods. Such topics include inter-team coordination, knowledge sharing, large project organisation, agile transformation, agile teamwork quality, project models that facilitate several self-organising teams, and practices for scaling agile methods. We accepted five full research papers, which are included in this volume. The accepted papers report empirical research studies using surveys, observations and case studies. Also, an interactive online discussion session was conducted to compare the two approaches, SAFe and Spotify. The workshop participants, which were around a hundred people, joined this discussion to compare the two approaches and suggest some future research questions about the hybridisation of SAFe and Spotify. This workshop summary contributes as a current snapshot of research along with some results from an interactive discussion about SAFe and Spotify

Portfolios of Agile Projects: A Complex Adaptive Systems’ Agent Perspective

While agile methods can be extremely effective at a project level, they can impose significant complexity and a need for adaptiveness at the project portfolio level. While this has proven to be highly problematic, there is little research on how to manage a set of agile projects at the project portfolio level. What limited research that does exist often assumes that portfolio-level agility can be achieved by simply scaling project level agile methods such as Scrum. This study uses a complex adaptive systems lens, focusing specifically on the properties of projects as agents in a complex adaptive portfolio to critically appraise current thinking on portfolio management in an agile context. We then draw on a set of 30 expert interviews to develop 16 CAS-based propositions as to how portfolios of agile projects can be managed effectively. We also outline an agenda for future research and discuss the differences between a CAS-based approach to portfolio management and traditional approaches