Coordination Mechanisms in Large-Scale Agile Software Development: A Longitudinal Empirical Investigation
Doctoral thesis
Year
2023Metadata
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- Institutt for informatikk [4944]
Abstract
Large-scale agile software development is characterized by the need to coordinate dependencies within and between teams using various coordination mechanisms. Research on large-scale agile has identified and described many coordination mechanisms, but until now there has not been a structured approach to identifying and describing mechanisms, their characteristics, and how they may change over time. This dissertation presents an overview of 47 coordination mechanisms used in a large-scale agile Norwegian development program and presents the development of the Framework for Analyzing Large-scale agile Coordination mechanisms (FALC). FALC is developed from longitudinal fieldwork including the observation of more than a hundred meetings and 37 interviews and consists of 1) a taxonomy of inter-team coordination mechanisms including meetings, roles, and tools and artefacts, 2) a framework for analyzing the mechanisms’ technical, organizational, social, and physical characteristics, and 3) a practical approach to analyzing change in coordination mechanisms. FALC is designed to be context-sensitive and is intended for both researchers and practitioners in understanding and selecting mechanisms across organizational contexts. By this, the Ph.D. thesis advances knowledge on coordination in large-scale agile, with the goal of contributing to successful agile software development and continuous value delivery in large-scale settings.List of papers
Paper 1. Berntzen, M., Moe, N.B., Stray, V. (2019). The Product Owner in Large-Scale Agile: An Empirical Study Through the Lens of Relational Coordination Theory. In: Kruchten, P., Fraser, S., Coallier, F. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 355. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-19034-7_8. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19034-7_8 |
Paper 2. Berntzen, M., Stray, V., Moe, N.B. (2021). Coordination Strategies: Managing Inter-team Coordination Challenges in Large-Scale Agile. In: Gregory, P., Lassenius, C., Wang, X., Kruchten, P. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 419. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-78098-2_9. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78098-2_9 |
Paper 3. A Taxonomy of Inter-Team Coordination Mechanisms in Large-Scale Agile. Marthe Berntzen, Rashina Hoda, Nils Brede Moe, and Viktoria Stray. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 49, 2 (pp. 699-718), 2022. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2022.3160873. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3160873 |
Paper 4. Responding to Change Over Time: A Longitudinal Case Study on Changes in Coordination Mechanisms in Large-Scale Agile. Marthe Berntzen, Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe and Rashina Hoda. Empirical Software Engineering, 28, 114 (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s10664-023-10349-0. The article is included in the thesis. Also available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10349-0 |