Integrering av traditionell projektledning ochmjukvaruutveckling: En fallstudie av en Agile-Stage-Gate-hybrid : En fallstudie av en Agile-Stage-Gate-hybrid
SAGA SIÖSTEEN · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2026
Large engineering organizations increasingly combine traditional Stage-Gate governance with Agile software development to manage complex hardware-software products. While hybrid Agile-Stage-Gate models are widely adopted in practice, prior research has mainly focused on their design and initial implementation, with limited empirical insight into how established hybrid models operate over time. In particular, little is known about how coordination is enacted in practice, how software progress is communicated to governance, and how decisions are made under conditions of limited information and high uncertainty. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to examine how the interface between Stage-Gate governance and Agile software development is enacted in practice, and how software development work is translated, made visible, and used to support decision-making in an established hybrid model. The thesis addresses this through a qualitative case study conducted at a global engineering organization developing integrated hardware, embedded software, and digital services. The study draws on semi-structured interviews, a workshop, observations, and internal documents. The empirical findings are structured around four analytical themes: Ways of Working Across Methods, Translation Across Methods, Decision Signals Under Uncertainty, and Making Work Visible Across Boundaries. The findings show that the interface between Stage-Gate governance and Agile software development is not organized around a single integration point, but is sustained through a distributed set of roles, artefacts, routines, and forums. Software progress is not communicated through full execution-level transparency, but through a limited set of simplified and decision-relevant signals. Governance decisions are therefore based on partial and aggregated representations of software work, and uncertainty is managed through incremental commitment, escalation, and postponement rather than eliminated through planning. The thesis contributes by proposing a visibility-and-translation perspective on hybrid project governance, showing how the effectiveness of hybrid arrangements is shaped by how software work is translated into decision-relevant forms and made visible in governance contexts. While based on a single case, the findings provide empirical insight into hybrid governance in practice and have implications for organizations managing software-intensive development under conditions of uncertainty.