Technical Dependency Challenges in Large-Scale Agile Software Development

Sekitoleko, Nelson; Evbota, Felix; Knauss, Eric; Sandberg, Anna; Chaudron, Michel R. V.; Olsson, Helena Holmström

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_4

Cited by 41 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…To employ these methods for large-scale development, complex features of large projects are broken down into smaller and better-defined tasks that can be assigned to multiple teams [12] . However this strategy introduces significant communication and coordination challenges at the inter-team level due to the emergence of complex and unforeseen interdependencies between modules that often have domino effects [12].…”

Section: Theory Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inter-team coordination in large-scale agile development

Crowston

Chudoba

Watson-Manheim

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We draw on Organizational Discontinuity Theory (ODT) to identify factors that increase communication and coordination problems between teams working on large software development projects. ODT posits that faced with a disruption in the expected flow of communication, called a discontinuity, individuals must make sense of the disruption to address the problem. They may be motivated to pay more attention to the situation and consider alternative actions to deal with the discontinuity, leading to the emergence of continuities, which are new behaviors, group practices and expectations. Continuities reduce or eliminate the attention and effort required to understand and manage the situation associated with problematic discontinuities. We propose a mixed-method study based on this model to examine the effects of discontinuities and the development of continuities on interteam coordination in large-scale agile software development. CCS Concepts• Software and its engineering➝Agile software development • Software and its engineering➝Programming teams

show abstract

Section: Theory Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inter-team coordination in large-scale agile development

Crowston

Chudoba

Watson-Manheim

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Despite the fact that software development in large mature companies is common, few studies investigate what makes the large mature company software development context unique. Certain aspects of the development are investigated in individual studies: scale and responsiveness (Olsson et al 2014), overscoping (Bjarnason et al 2012, large-scale agile (van Waardenburg and van Vliet 2013;Dikert et al 2016), configuration management (Fauzi et al 2010), dependencies and communication (Sekitoleko et al 2014), distributed development (Wagstrom and Datta 2014) and heavy processes (Laukkanen et al 2016). The studies focus on different aspects of large mature companies: number of customers (Olsson et al 2014), plan-driven processes (Laukkanen et al 2016;Bjarnason et al 2012; van Waardenburg and van Vliet 2013), number of personnel (Dikert et al 2016), and organizational distance (Fauzi et al 2010;Sekitoleko et al 2014;Wagstrom and Datta 2014).…”

Section: Organizational Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of release engineering practices in a large mature company and a startup

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Modern release engineering practices provide multiple benefits for software companies, but organizations have struggled when trying to adopt the most advanced practices, such as continuous delivery. It is not known in which contexts the most advanced practices are applicable and what can be achieved by adopting them. In this study, we discuss the effect of the organizational context on adopted release engineering practices and what outcomes are achieved with the practices. We study two organizational contexts: the startup and the large mature company context. The effect of the product context is mitigated by studying two case organizations with similar products, a rare research opportunity. We performed 18 interviews with various roles in the case organizations. The number of production environments, the number of customers, the control over the production environment, the available resources, the organization size and the distribution of the organization affected the release engineering practices and the ability to release frequently. Having less internal verification and more customer verification enabled fast feedback and customer experimentation in the startup context, but increased the number of production defects. However, having more internal verification in the large mature company context surprisingly did not prevent production defects. The organizational context had a large effect on how achievable modern release engineering practices, such as continuous delivery, were. In the startup context, Communicated by: Hakan Erdogmus

show abstract

“…Wolfang Trumler and Frances Paulisch [8] coupled unit and integration tests with the low level details of requirements' specification to avoid technical debt and enhance release predictability. Nelson Sekitoleko [9] found that improved knowledge sharing between technical and managerial staff on different levels can significantly improve the ability to create a good plan that considers interdependencies between features and addresses both business and technical challenges. Robert Phaal and Gerrit Muller [10] discussed the value of having what they called "Linked analysis grids" that is used in directly linking business requirements with technological aspects of these requirements, then use a scoring technique that ranks product's backlog according to technical priority and complexity.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%