Large-scale agile software development and coordination: A teaching case
Viktoria Gulliksen Stray, Marthe Nordengen Berntzen, Nils Brede Moe · Journal of Systems and Software · 2026
This teaching case examines coordination in large-scale agile development through a case based on a Nordic public technology company that provides national digital infrastructure for travel planning and ticketing. The case company, Norda, began with a handful of cross-functional teams and one main client, then expanded to roughly twenty teams as new clients joined and platform complexity increased. The case traces how inter-team dependencies, uneven ways of working, and stakeholder pressure created coordination challenges and delays for a national platform with public visibility. Students engage with three interconnected dilemmas that frequently arise when scaling agile. The first concerns whether to formalize coordination through stronger program governance and shared routines or mycolorminor to maintain a high degree of team-level self-organization. The second asks whether to improve daily coordination of existing dependencies or reorganize teams and architecture to reduce dependencies at the source. The third focuses on whether to emphasize co-located collaboration or adopt a digital-first approach suited to hybrid and distributed work. Grounded in multiple empirical studies of coordination in large-scale agile development, the case challenges students to propose coherent choices across the three dilemmas and to justify expected effects on predictability, quality, and motivation. The case offers two alternative tracks depending on student experience level and is designed to support learning outcomes related to analyzing coordination needs in large-scale agile development, evaluating strategic trade-offs, and creating actionable recommendations for a complex multi-team setting.