Background: The adoption of agile scaling frameworks has become increasingly prevalent in the software industry as organizations seek to extend the use of agile to large and complex projects. The frameworks claim to provide the necessary structure and guidance for scaling agile practices across multiple teams and domains. Despite their growing popularity, the challenges of adopting the frameworks are poorly understood. Aims: In this study, we analyze the experienced challenges related to adopting agile scaling frameworks to understand whether they are different for the different frameworks or between industries or roles within the adopting organization. Method: We conducted a survey targeting software practitioners with experience adopting agile scaling frameworks. We received 204 valid responses, representing ten frameworks adopted in 26 countries and six continents. Results: The most salient challenge, regardless of scaling framework, industry, or role, was organizational politics. Across frameworks, the challenge of forming agile teams emerged as the second most significant and change resistance as the third. We found significant differences in the challenges experienced by organizations based on their chosen framework and significant differences in the challenges between different industries and organizational roles, highlighting the importance of context when adopting agile scaling frameworks. Conclusions: This study provides the first quantitative assessment of the challenges of adopting specific agile scaling frameworks in various contexts. By comparing the challenges associated with different frameworks, industries, and organizational roles, other organizations can better understand the most significant obstacles they may face and improve their framework fit to mitigate them. Future studies could build on these findings to provide additional insights and recommendations for organizations seeking to adopt agile scaling frameworks, including identifying strategies for overcoming common challenges and improving the overall effectiveness of these frameworks in a diverse range of contexts.

Background: The benefits of agile methods in small, co-located projects have inspired their adoption in large firms and projects. Scaling frameworks, such as Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), have been proposed by practitioners to scale agile to larger contexts, and become rather widely adopted in the industry. Despite the popularity of the frameworks, the knowledge on the reasons, expected benefits, and satisfaction of organizations adopting them is still limited.

Abstract During the last two decades, turbulent business environments tempted firms to adopt agile methods to cope with the ever-changing customer demands. The success of agile methods in small and co-located teams inspired companies to apply them to large-scale endeavors. Agile scaling frameworks, such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), have been proposed by practitioners to scale agile practices to large projects and enterprises. Companies are increasingly taking these frameworks into use. However, the number of quantitative empirical studies assessing the benefits and challenges of adopting the agile scaling frameworks is still limited. This paper starts filling in this gap by presenting the results from a survey of 100 industry participants around the world on their perception of the benefits and challenges of adopting the SAFe framework. Our results show that the SAFe adoption improves transparency, as well as collaboration and dependency management between agile teams. The most commonly mentioned challenges of the SAFe adoption are organizational politics, difficulties in establishing an agile mindset, change resistance, and team formation challenges.

Abstract Over the past decade, agile methods have become the favored choice for projects undertaken in rapidly changing environments. The success of agile methods in small, co-located projects has inspired companies to apply them in larger projects. Agile scaling frameworks, such as Large Scale Scrum and Scaled Agile Framework, have been invented by practitioners to scale agile to large projects and organizations. Given the importance of agile scaling frameworks, research on those frameworks is still limited. This paper presents our findings from an empirical survey answered by the methodologists of 15 agile scaling frameworks. We explored (i) framework evolution, (ii) main reasons behind their creation, (iii) benefits, and (iv) challenges of adopting these frameworks. The most common reasons behind creating the frameworks were improving the organization’s agility and collaboration between agile teams. The most commonly claimed benefits included enabling frequent deliveries and enhancing employee satisfaction, motivation, and engagement. The most mentioned challenges were using frameworks as cooking recipes instead of focusing on changing people’s culture and mindset.

The widespread use of agile methods shows a fundamental shift in the way organizations try to cope with unpredictable competitive environments. In large-scale agile settings, multiple development activities need to be coordinated to achieve desirable enterprise-wide effects and agility. A powerful instrument to effectively guide and steer large-scale agile endeavors is the formulation and usage of architecture principles. Despite their raison d'être to guide large organizational transformations, extant studies on how principles can be used to support large-scale agile transformations are still lacking. Against this backdrop, we present a multiple-case study involving five German companies that aims to shed light on the establishment of architecture principles to support large-scale agile transformations. Based on our results from sixteen semi-structured interviews, we present current practices as well as challenges faced by organizations during the application of architecture principles. In addition, we show a set of principles used to support large-scale agile transformations.

Over the last two decades, agile methods have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their software development processes. In contrast to traditional methods, agile methods place more emphasis on flexible processes than on detailed upfront plans and heavy documentation. Since agile methods have proved to be successful at the team level, large organizations are now aiming to scale agile methods to the enterprise level by adopting and applying so-called scaling agile frameworks such as Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) or Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Although there is a growing body of literature on large-scale agile development, literature documenting actual experiences related to scaling agile frameworks is still scarce. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a case study on the adoption and application of LeSS in four different products of a German automobile manufacturer. Based on seven interviews, we present how the organization adopted and applied LeSS, and discuss related challenges and success factors. The comparison of the products indicates that transparency, training courses and workshops, and change management are crucial for a successful adoption.

Abstract Over the past two decades, agile methods have transformed and brought unique changes to software development practice by strongly emphasizing team collaboration, customer involvement, and change tolerance. The success of agile methods for small, co-located teams has inspired organizations to increasingly use them on a larger scale to build complex software systems. The scaling of agile methods poses new challenges such as inter-team coordination, dependencies to other existing environments or distribution of work without a defined architecture. The latter is also the reason why large-scale agile development has been subject to criticism since it neglects detailed assistance on software architecting. Although there is a growing body of literature on large-scale agile development, literature documenting the collaboration between architects and agile teams in such development efforts is still scarce. As little research has been conducted on this issue, this paper aims to fill this gap by providing a case study of a German consumer electronics retailer’s large-scale agile development program. Based on social network analysis, this study describes the collaboration between architects and agile teams in terms of architecture sharing.

Over the last two decades, agile methods have transformed and brought unique changes to software development practice by strongly emphasizing team collaboration, customer involvement, and change tolerance. The success of agile methods for small, co-located teams has inspired organizations to increasingly apply agile practices to large-scale efforts. Since these methods are originally designed for small teams, unprecedented challenges occur when introducing them at larger scale, such as inter-team coordination and communication, dependencies with other organizational units or general resistances to changes. Compared to the rich body of agile software development literature describing typical challenges, recurring challenges of stakeholders and initiatives in large-scale agile development has not yet been studied through secondary studies sufficiently. With this paper, we aim to fill this gap by presenting a structured literature review on challenges in large-scale agile development. We identified 79 challenges grouped into eleven categories.

This study describes the roles of architects in scaling agile frameworks with the help of a structured literature review. We aim to provide a primary analysis of 20 identified scaling agile frameworks. Subsequently, we thoroughly describe three popular scaling agile frameworks: Scaled Agile Framework, Large Scale Scrum, and Disciplined Agile 2.0. After specifying the main concepts of scaling agile frameworks, we characterize roles of enterprise, software, solution, and information architects, as identified in four scaling agile frameworks. Finally, we provide a discussion of generalizable findings on the role of architects in scaling agile frameworks.