Visualizing Inter-Team Coordination
Tomas Gustavsson · 2020
As agile ways of working are implemented in larger settings, inter-team coordination becomes increasingly important. Some dependencies between teams can be identified in advance, but much of the dependencies in software development emerge as the system evolve. A way to identify, manage, assess, and evaluate the status of dependencies is to visualize dependencies between teams. New artifacts and routines for visualizing dependencies are suggested from the increasingly popular Scaled Agile Framework, SAFe. This multiple case study focuses on how inter-team coordination is visualized by providing a rich description of two years of implementation and tailoring of the boundary object called the program board at the (anonymized) organizations A-Gov and B-Bank. A total of 183 hours of observations and 14 interviews were used for triangulation purposes. The findings present the difficulties of keeping visualizations up to date. By inventing and tailoring the routines of managing the Program Board, the current situation of dependencies could be visualized and kept track of. The findings also indicate the importance of how dependencies are defined.