Large-scale agile development has gained widespread interest in the software industry, but it is a topic with few empirical studies of practice. Development projects at scale introduce a range of new challenges in managing a large number of people and teams, often with high uncertainty about product requirements and technical solutions. The coordination of teams has been identified as one of the main challenges. This study presents a rich longitudinal explanatory case study of a very large software development programme with 10 development teams. We focus on inter-team coordination in two phases: one that applies a first-generation agile development method and another that uses a second-generation one. We identified 27 coordination mechanisms in the first phase, and 14 coordination mechanisms in the second. Based on an analysis of coordination strategies and mechanisms, we develop five propositions on how the transition from a first- to a second-generation method impacts coordination. These propositions have implications for theory and practice.

Large global companies need to speed up their innovation activities to increase competitive advantage. However, such companies' organizational structures impede their ability to capture trends they are well aware of due to bureaucracy, slow decision-making, distributed departments, and distributed processes. One way to strengthen the innovation capability is through fostering internal startups. We report findings from an embedded multiple-case study of five internal startups in a globally distributed company to identify barriers for software product innovation: late involvement of software developers, executive sponsor is missing or not clarified, yearly budgeting and planning, unclear decision-making authority, lack of digital infrastructure for experimentation and access to data from external actors. Drawing on the framework of continuous software engineering proposed by Fitzgerald and Stol, we discuss the role of BizDev in software product innovation. We suggest that lack of continuity, rather than the lack of speed, is an ultimate challenge for internal startups in large global companies.

Software product innovation in large organizations is fundamentally challenging because of restrained freedom and flexibility to conduct experiments. As a response, large agile companies form internal startups to initiate employ-driven innovation, inspired by Lean startup. This case study investigates how communities of practice support five internal startups in developing new software products within a large organization. We observed six communities of practice meetings, two workshops and conducted ten semi-structured interviews over the course of a year. Our findings show that a community of practice, called the Innovation guild, allowed internal startups to help each other by collectively solving problems, creating shared practices, and sharing knowledge. This study confirms that benefits documented in earlier research into CoPs also hold true in the context of software product innovation in large organizations. Henceforth, we suggest that similar innovation guilds, as described in this paper, can support large companies in the innovation race for new software products.

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Effective coordination is the key to successful agile teams. They rely on frequent interactions and mutual adjustment to manage dependencies between activities, which traditionally has been solved by co-locating the team. As the world is adjusting to post-covid work-life, companies are moving towards a work-from-anywhere approach where workers can choose to what degree they want to work from home or office. However, little is known about coordination in such a context. We report findings on developers’ emerging strategies when working-from-anywhere, from an exploratory case study in Norway, including eight interviews. Our study shows that new strategies for mutual adjustment emerged as teams experimented with different tools and approaches: developers chose tasks according to location, tasks with vague requirements are performed collocated while individual tasks requiring focus are best performed at home; large meetings are virtual, preserving co-located time for collaborative tasks; using virtual rooms to maintain unscheduled meetings as they communicate mental presence to teammates, lowering the threshold for intra-team unscheduled talks. The strategies can help organizations create a productive and effective environment for developers.