Inter-team coordination mechanisms in large-scale agile
Helga Nyrud, Viktoria Gulliksen Stray · 2017
Coordination is an important but challenging success factor in large-scale software development. Large-scale is particularly demanding because it involves several teams, and therefore we chose to study coordination between teams. Our aim of this case study was to investigate inter-team coordination mechanisms. By using an established framework from the field of sociology, we found eleven different coordination mechanisms that we mapped into the five different categories. We interviewed four project members and observed 26 meetings in three different teams as part of a larger digitization project. Our results show that even though there are many impersonal mechanisms in the form of various guidelines and rules, the most important mechanism seem to be ad-hoc conversations between two or more project members. The large-scale project had many regularly scheduled meetings. However, the majority of these meetings tended to be, to a greater extent, about reporting status and not about co-ordinating work. The scheduled meeting that was the most time-consuming, and also involved little coordination, was the daily stand-up meeting with two teams. Future work should investigate how to increase the value of daily stand-up meetings in large-scale programs, and whether the meetings can be organized in a way that enables more inter-team coordination.