Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations: A systematic literature review
By Kim-Karol Dikert, M. Paasivaara, C. Lassenius. Journal of Systems and Software, 2016
800 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Systematic review on large-scale agile transformations analyzing 52 papers.We identify 35 reported challenges in 9 categories, and 29 success factors in 11 categories.Few academic studies (6), mostly experience reports (46) identified.Challenges e.g. difficulty of implementing, integrating other functions, and change resistance.Success factors e.g. choosing and tailoring, management support, and mindset. Agile methods have become an appealing alternative for companies striving to improve their performance, but the methods were originally designed for small and individual teams. This creates unique challenges when introducing agile at scale, when development teams must synchronize their activities, and there might be a need to interface with other organizational units. In this paper we present a systematic literature review on how agile methods and lean software development has been adopted at scale, focusing on reported challenges and success factors in the transformation. We conducted a systematic literature review of industrial large-scale agile transformations. Our keyword search found 1875 papers. We included 52 publications describing 42 industrial cases presenting the process of taking large-scale agile development into use. Almost 90% of the included papers were experience reports, indicating a lack of sound academic research on the topic. We identified 35 reported challenges grouped into nine categories, and 29 success factors, grouped into eleven categories. The most salient success factor categories were management support, choosing and customizing the agile model, training and coaching, and mindset and alignment.
Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/424907d6f1909c6dbc126f0b428a9e099a52d203
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Citations in the corpus
- Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment: A Systematic Review on Approaches, Tools, Challenges and Practices (2017, background): “General resistance to change: Whilst employees generally resist to change, people may embrace changes provided that there are convincing reasons for those changes [47].”