To schedule or not to schedule? An investigation of meetings as an inter-team coordination mechanism in largescale agile software development

Abstract

Coordination of teams is critical when managing large programmes that involve multiple teams. In large-scale software development, work is carried out simultaneously by many developers and development teams. Results are delivered frequently and iteratively, which requires coordination on different levels, e.g., the programme, project, and team levels. Prior studies of knowledge work indicate that such work relies heavily on coordination through "personal" modes such as mutual adjustment between individuals or through scheduled or unscheduled meetings. In agile software development processes, principles and work structures emerge during the project and are not predetermined. We studied how coordination through scheduled and unscheduled meetings changes over time in two large software development programmes relying on agile methods. Our findings include transitions from scheduled to unscheduled meetings and from unscheduled to scheduled meetings. The transitions have been initiated both bottom-up and top-down in the programme organizations. The main implication is that programme management needs to be sensitive to the vital importance of coordination and the coordination needs as they change over time. Further, when starting a program, we recommend to early identify the important scheduled meetings, as having enough scheduled meetings is important to develop a common understanding of domain knowledge.

A Taxonomy of Inter-Team Coordination Mechanisms in Large-Scale Agile

“…Previous research on large-scale agile development practices has identified and described several individual inter-team coordination mechanisms. Examples include planned and unplanned meetings [15], [47], [48], communication platforms and tools such as Slack and JIRA [20], groups of representatives (often referred to as communities of practice) [3], [21]- [23] boundary-spanner roles such as product owners and architects [24], [54], and open spaces for inter-team coordination [5]. We revisit existing research on inter-team coordination mechanisms in Section 5.…”

“…Successful coordination of activities such as iteration and sprint planning, backlog grooming [15], bottom-up architecture design, product demonstrations, and continuous deployment and delivery [5], [16] dictate the success or failure of large-scale agile software development. Therefore, dependencies must be managed continuously throughout the development life cycle.…”

A longitudinal explanatory case study of coordination in a very large development programme: the impact of transitioning from a first- to a second-generation large-scale agile development method

“…The group mode of coordination in large-scale agile development was further analysed in a study of two empirical cases, with a focus on changes in coordination modes over time (Moe et al 2018). These changes included transitions from scheduled to unscheduled meetings and from unscheduled to scheduled meetings.…”

Changes to team autonomy in large-scale software development: a multiple case study of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) implementations

“…Practices for inter-team coordination have been proposed in the agile community to reduce the negative impacts of agile while also maintaining the positive impacts of teamwork stemming from agile ways of working [5]. These practices include, for example, scheduled and unscheduled meetings, as well as the use of shared visualization tools [6]. Moreover, many organizations use large-scale agile frameworks that come with pre-determined coordination practices and tools aimed at improving the inter-team coordination of software development.…”