Inter-team Coordination in Large-Scale Agile Software Development Projects

Sammanfattning: Software development organizations worldwide are adopting values, principles, and frameworks to implement Agile ways of working. The advantages of Agile ways of working are seen in teams that are allowed a high level of autonomy. The Agile methods were initially designed for use in small, single-team projects, and routines for coordination between several teams have not been adopted in the same way as routines for coordination within the team. With several teams coordinating, autonomy must, to some extent, be sacrificed in the individual team. Work needs to be coordinated with other teams, and a project is often part of a portfolio or program. The purpose of this research is to investigate routines for inter-team coordination: how they are performed; if, how and why they are tailored, and the impacts of these added routines in relation to Agile values and principles, in particular team autonomy.This thesis is based on empirical studies at three organizations with disparate business logics. One is a product development department in the automotive industry, one is a business bank, and one is an IT department at a Swedish government agency. Data has been collected from 379 hours of on-site observations, 28 interviews, and 201 answers to a survey questionnaire.Insights from these cases build on coordination theories as well as institutional logics (new institutional theory). One contribution of this thesis is the rich descriptions of tailoring of inter-team coordination routines. Another contribution is the identified perceived impacts of the implemented inter-team coordination routines, especially regarding perceived changes to team autonomy. An important theoretical contribution is the identified and defined institutional logics (Agile toolbox logic, Agile rulebook logic, Flow efficiency logic, and Resource efficiency logic), which can be used for analysis of large-scale Agile software development projects.