Scaling Agile Beyond Organizational Boundaries: Coordination Challenges in Software Ecosystems

Abstract

The shift from sequential to agile software development originates from relatively small and co-located teams but soon gained prominence in larger organizations. How to apply and scale agile practices to fit the needs of larger projects has been studied to quite an extent in previous research. However, scaling agile beyond organizational boundaries, for instance in a software ecosystem context, raises additional challenges that existing studies and approaches do not yet investigate or address in great detail. For that reason, we conducted a case study in two software ecosystems that comprise several agile actors from different organizations and, thereby, scale development across organizational boundaries, in order to elaborate and understand their coordination challenges. Our results indicate that most of the identified challenges are caused by long communication paths and a lack of established processes to facilitate these paths. As a result, the participants in our study, among others, experience insufficient responsivity, insufficient communication of prioritizations and deliverables, and alterations or loss of information. As a consequence, agile practices need to be extended to fit the identified needs.

Measuring Agile software project success beyond the triple constraint

“…• Insufficient Agile experience and insufficient training and education: If the current staff do not have experience in Agile, it then becomes difficult to successfully adopt Agile because the development of Agile needs employees who are experienced to drive and enable new way of operating (Figalist et al 2019). • Lack of management support: Lack of management support affects middle management because if the top management fails to implement an Agile transformation plan that is strong, the middle management will then feel isolated and in turn it will result in resistance to adopt Agile (Hoda, Salleh & Grundy 2018).…”

“…Culture change is the main dominant challenge in the implementation of Agile in any organisation. Starting small is important in ensuring that everyone in the organisation understands Agile concepts and benefits (Figalist et al 2019). • General organisation resistance to change: People are not willing to change due to inconsistent processes and practices across teams, pervasiveness of traditional development methods, lack of business/ customer availability, lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing and fragmented tooling and project related data (Dikert et al 2016;VersionOne Inc. 2019).…”