Abstract
The adoption of agile methodologies is increasing. The methods are usually designed for one team of 5-12 people. This makes the adoption challenging for large organizations. Little research has been conducted on the implementation of agile methods in large projects. Therefore this master thesis describes a large project using agile methods.
To describe the project there were conducted 21 interviews with people working on it. The analysis of the interviews lead to a description of how the project has been organized, and how they have tailored the Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) Framework to their context. The tailorings include removing activities with both teams and introducing an advi- sory meeting where business developers could get advice from architects on their proposed features. There were also done tailorings to enable using the method in an enterprise context, such as status meetings and a Project Management Office which in turn was controlled by line managers. These tailorings seem to be linked to the following two challenges:
• Company organization and policy: The line managers in the company demand reports and extra meetings that otherwise would not be necessary for an agile project. This is experienced as a both time consuming and limiting to the development, by the team members.
• Understanding of agile methodologies in the company: Business developers and others not working with software de- velopment are unfamiliar with agile methodologies, which also seems to be a limiting factor, as the development process is not completely understood.
The challenges and the benefits of the implementations have been compared with other case studies, and similarities have been identified.
The findings can be used when implementing agile in other large organizations. It can also be used to rework existing agile methodolo- gies to better suit large organizations and projects. This can transform current methods so that more organizations can make use of them.
To describe the project there were conducted 21 interviews with people working on it. The analysis of the interviews lead to a description of how the project has been organized, and how they have tailored the Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) Framework to their context. The tailorings include removing activities with both teams and introducing an advi- sory meeting where business developers could get advice from architects on their proposed features. There were also done tailorings to enable using the method in an enterprise context, such as status meetings and a Project Management Office which in turn was controlled by line managers. These tailorings seem to be linked to the following two challenges:
• Company organization and policy: The line managers in the company demand reports and extra meetings that otherwise would not be necessary for an agile project. This is experienced as a both time consuming and limiting to the development, by the team members.
• Understanding of agile methodologies in the company: Business developers and others not working with software de- velopment are unfamiliar with agile methodologies, which also seems to be a limiting factor, as the development process is not completely understood.
The challenges and the benefits of the implementations have been compared with other case studies, and similarities have been identified.
The findings can be used when implementing agile in other large organizations. It can also be used to rework existing agile methodolo- gies to better suit large organizations and projects. This can transform current methods so that more organizations can make use of them.
