Identifying and Structuring Challenges in Large-Scale Agile Development Based on a Structured Literature Review

Abstract

Over the last two decades, agile methods have transformed and brought unique changes to software development practice by strongly emphasizing team collaboration, customer involvement, and change tolerance. The success of agile methods for small, co-located teams has inspired organizations to increasingly apply agile practices to large-scale efforts. Since these methods are originally designed for small teams, unprecedented challenges occur when introducing them at larger scale, such as inter-team coordination and communication, dependencies with other organizational units or general resistances to changes. Compared to the rich body of agile software development literature describing typical challenges, recurring challenges of stakeholders and initiatives in large-scale agile development has not yet been studied through secondary studies sufficiently. With this paper, we aim to fill this gap by presenting a structured literature review on challenges in large-scale agile development. We identified 79 challenges grouped into eleven categories.