Assigned roles for inter-team coordination in large-scale agile development
Tomas Gustavsson · 2017
Inter-team coordination has been recognized as one of the most important challenges in large-scale agile development settings. Except specific practices, such as Scrum of Scrums meetings, certain roles are often reported to be responsible for areas of coordination in case studies. Although agile values state that coordination should be dealt with face-to-face by individuals, two commonly used prescriptive frameworks for large-scale agile development suggests contrasting ways of coordinating regarding roles and their responsibilities. One propose additional coordinating roles leaving less mandate and autonomy to the single team while the other propose no additional roles, compared to the original roles of Scrum, allowing more autonomy to the teams. This literature review is an analysis of roles assigned with the responsibility for inter-team coordination in 42 case studies of large-scale agile development settings. The review shows that only four of the analyzed organizations appoints roles according to the large-scale agile frameworks. Rather, a wide range of different additional roles with different role tailoring is displayed where the majority is focusing on vertical coordination rather than horizontal coordination. In three of the cases, the role setup has specifically targeted coordination for architectural issues. The study shows that the prescriptive frameworks are seen as toolboxes leaving the responsibility for tailoring to the single organization. This implies a stronger need for theoretical support on what to use as basis for tailoring of roles and their responsibilities.