Maria Paasivaara

Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations

Systematic review on large-scale agile transformations analyzing 52 papers.We identify 35 reported challenges in 9 categories, and 29 success factors in 11 categories.Few academic studies (6), mostly experience reports (46) identified.Challenges e.g. difficulty of implementing, integrating other functions, and change resistance.Success factors e.g. choosing and tailoring, management support, and mindset. Agile methods have become an appealing alternative for companies striving to improve their performance, but the methods were originally designed for small and individual teams. This creates unique challenges when introducing agile at scale, when development teams must synchronize their activities, and there might be a need to interface with other organizational units. In this paper we present a systematic literature review on how agile methods and lean software development has been adopted at scale, focusing on reported challenges and success factors in the transformation. We conducted a systematic literature review of industrial large-scale agile transformations. Our keyword search found 1875 papers. We included 52 publications describing 42 industrial cases presenting the process of taking large-scale agile development into use. Almost 90% of the included papers were experience reports, indicating a lack of sound academic research on the topic. We identified 35 reported challenges grouped into nine categories, and 29 success factors, grouped into eleven categories. The most salient success factor categories were management support, choosing and customizing the agile model, training and coaching, and mindset and alignment.

Communities of practice in a large distributed agile software development organization - Case Ericsson

Context: Communities of practice—groups of experts who share a common interest or topic and collectively want to deepen their knowledge—can be an important part of a successful lean and agile adoption in particular in large organizations. Objective: In this paper, we present a study on how a large organization within Ericsson with 400 persons in 40 Scrum teams at three sites adopted the use of Communities of Practice (CoP) as part of their transformation from a traditional plan-driven organization to lean and agile. Methods: We collected data by 52 semi-structured interviews on two sites, and longitudinal non-participant observation of the transformation during over 20 site visits over a period of two years. Results: The organization had over 20 CoPs, gathering weekly, bi-weekly or on a need basis. CoPs had several purposes including knowledge sharing and learning, coordination, technical work, and organizational development. Examples of CoPs include Feature Coordination CoPs to coordinate between teams working on the same feature, a Coaching CoP to discuss agile implementation challenges and successes and to help lead the organizational continuous improvement, an end-to-end CoP to remove bottlenecks from the flow, and Developers CoPs to share good development practices. Success factors of well-functioning CoPs include having a good topic, passionate leader, proper agenda, decision making authority, open community, supporting tools, suitable rhythm, and cross-site participation when needed. Organizational support include creating a supportive atmosphere and providing a suitable infrastructure for CoPs. Conclusions: In the case organization, CoPs were initially used to support the agile transformation, and as part of the distributed Scrum implementation. As the transformation progressed, the CoPs also took on the role of supporting continuous organizational improvements. CoPs became a central mechanism behind the success of the large-scale agile implementation in the case organization that helped mitigate some of the most pressing problems of the agile transformation. 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

Reflecting the Choice and Usage of Communication Tools in GSD Projects with Media Synchronicity Theory

Global software development projects use a variety of communication media, such as teleconferences, email and instant messaging to overcome the challenges caused by the distances. Each communication media has different properties and capabilities to mediate the communication on different software engineering tasks. The use of different tools imply different communication practices. In this paper, we report our findings on communication in twelve distributed software projects: which communication tools were used, how they were used, and how communication tool use was related to different tasks in the project studied. We analyze the tool use and articulated rationale for choosing the communication tools for various tasks in distributed software development based on communicative processes and medium properties. We found evidence supporting applicability of media synchronicity theory in selecting communication tools for GSD projects.

Teaching students scrum using LEGO blocks

In this paper, we present a LEGO-based Scrum simulation game that we used twice with Master’s level students at Aalto University. The game was initially developed as an internal training tool in F-Secure Corporation, a Finnish security software company, to support their agile adoption. In the game, student teams learn the Scrum roles, events and concepts in practice by simulating several development Sprints, while incrementally planning and building a product of LEGO blocks. Student satisfaction was measured by a survey at the end of the course, and student learning evalu- ated by learning diaries. Our results show that the students were highly satisfied with the game, and that students with various degrees of experience with Scrum all learned a lot. In particular, students reported gaining insights about require- ments management and customer collaboration, effective teamwork, and the Scrum roles.

Teaching students global software engineering skills using distributed scrum

In this paper we describe distributed Scrum augmented with best practices in global software engineering (GSE) as an important paradigm for teaching critical competencies in GSE. We report on a globally distributed project course between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. The project-driven course involved 16 students in Canada and 9 students in Finland, divided into three cross-site Scrum teams working on a single large project. To assess learning of GSE competencies we employed a mixed-method approach including 13 post-course interviews, pre-, post-course and iteration questionnaires, observations, recordings of Daily Scrums as well as collection of project asynchronous communication data. Our analysis indicates that the Scrum method, along with supporting collaboration practices and tools, supports the learning of important GSE competencies, such as distributed communication and teamwork, building and maintaining trust, using appropriate collaboration tools, and inter-cultural collaboration.

Integrating Global Sites into the Lean and Agile Transformation at Ericsson

Transforming a large organization from a plan-driven process to agile development is challenging. Despite this, large organizations are increasingly adopting agile development and lean thinking. However, there is little research on how to conduct a successful transformation in large organizations, which often are globally distributed. In this paper we discuss how one R&D unit of Ericsson integrated three global sites into their lean and agile transformation involving 400 persons in Finland, Hungary and the US. We describe the challenges and success factors in integrating the global sites. We collected the data by 45 semi-structured interviews and longitudinally observing the transformation during over 20 site visits. Success factors include: early and broad involvement of global sites at all organizational levels, constant communication and cross-site visits, and creation of joint infrastructure. The challenges include: creating a shared understanding of the change, enabling end-to-end development, bridging cultural differences and creating transparency.

Teaching a globally distributed project course using Scrum practices

This paper describes the goals, design and initial challenges encountered in teaching a globally distributed software development course in collaboration between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. The project-driven collaboration course involved 16 students in Canada and nine students in Finland, divided into three globally distributed Scrum teams working on the same project. The teams worked on extending Agilefant, an open-source backlog management system, in direct interaction with its product owner. The collaborative development is based on the Scrum methodology. We describe how the Scrum methodology was implemented, and adapted to work in a distributed environment, as well as the infrastructure used to support collaboration, e.g. local war-rooms, and multiple communication tools. We conclude the paper with describing initial challenges encountered, including cultural, semester, course and curriculum differences, as well as technical and time-zone issues.

Reflecting the choice and usage of communication tools in global software development projects with media synchronicity theory

Global software development (GSD) projects use a variety of communication tools, such as teleconferences, email, and instant messaging to overcome the challenges caused by distribution. The use of different tools implies different communication needs and practices within the project. Media synchronicity theory (MST) breaks communication down into two processes — conveyance of information and convergence of understanding — and communication media capabilities into five: immediacy of feedback, parallelism, symbol variety, rehearsability, and reprocessability. According to MST, media capabilities differ in support for conveyance and convergence, and for good performance, there should be match between media capabilities and communication process needed in a given task. In this paper, we present our qualitative study on communication in GSD. We interviewed 79 individuals from 12 GSD projects. We discuss which communication tools were used and how. We analyze the tool use and articulated rationale for choosing the tools for various tasks in distributed software development based on the two communicative processes and five media properties suggested by MST. We found evidence supporting the applicability of MST as an aid in selecting communication tools for GSD projects. Copyright

A Mapping Study on Requirements Engineering in Agile Software Development

Agile software development (ASD) methods have gained popularity in the industry and been the subject of an increasing amount of academic research. Although requirements engineering (RE) in ASD has been studied, the overall understanding of RE in ASD as a phenomenon is still weak. We conducted a mapping study of RE in ASD to review the scientific literature. 28 articles on the topic were identified and analyzed. The results indicate that the definition of agile RE is vague. The proposed benefits from agile RE included lower process overheads, a better requirements understanding, a reduced tendency to over allocate development resources, responsiveness to change, rapid delivery of value, and improved customer relationships. The problematic areas of agile RE were the use of customer representatives, the user story requirements format, the prioritization of requirements, growing technical debt, tacit requirements knowledge, and imprecise effort estimation. We also report proposed solutions to the identified problems.

Stakeholder Perceptions of the Adoption of Continuous Integration -- A Case Study

Continuous integration is an important support mechanism for fast delivery of new features. However, its adoption in industry has often been problematic, partly due to social challenges. However, there is little knowledge of the exact nature of the challenges, and how different stakeholders perceive the need for and adoption of continuous integration. In this paper, we describe how the introduction of continuous integration was perceived by different stakeholders in a R&D program at Ericsson. The case provided a rare opportunity to study the adoption of continuous integration in a large distributed organization. We interviewed 27 stakeholders and found differing perceptions of continuous integration: how suitable it is for the organization, how adoption should be organized, and whether it is possible to achieve sufficient quality through automated testing. These differences of perception were mainly consequences of the geographic distribution. Based on the case study, we propose three guidelines. First, understand that the product architecture has a significant effect on the adoption. However, do not let architectural problems keep you from implementing continuous integration. Second, give the team members sufficient time to overcome the initial learning phase in the adoption. Third, avoid centralizing competencies to individual sites, and invest in cross-site communication.