This paper presents the design of a tool for recurring quantitative self-assessment of IT Service Management (ITSM) process maturity in a financial institution implementing agile software development as a new way of working. This change brought on an increased need to monitor ITSM process performance, and a Design Science Research (DSR) project was launched to create an ITSM maturity assessment tool. Continual improvement of ITSM processes can be measured by performing a process maturity assessment, comparing the organization’s process performance against a best-practice reference set of processes. This paper reports a development project for a quantitative measuring survey-based tool. Due to the increasing use of agile methods, there is an increase in research attention to the coexistence of agile and ITSM maturity assessment tools. The results show that a company-wide ITSM process maturity assessment can be established as a survey-based self-assessment in an agile software development context. The aggregate scores from this self-assessment present a good indicator of the organization’s process performance, especially when complemented by a reference score. A key learning is that the iterative DSR methodology made it possible to create a tool that in good way measure ITSM process maturity in an agile context. 

We conducted a case study to examine the challenges encountered in large-scale agile development (LSAD) within two Swedish software companies. While agile methodologies have proven successful in small and medium-sized projects, their implementation in large-scale software development projects can be problematic. To identify these challenges, we employed thematic analysis, which revealed a total of 26 distinct challenges. These challenges were categorized into three main themes: Processes and practices, Teams, and Organizational-level challenges in LSAD. By recognizing and addressing these challenges, projects operating in similar contexts can synchronize their activities and harness the advantages of agile methodologies at a large scale. The article delves into comprehensive discussions on these challenges, offering valuable insights and directions for future research endeavors.

Earlier research has focused on technical debt (TD). While numerous issues connected to non-technical aspects of software development (SD) that are equally worthy of”debt” status are neglected. Simultaneously, these types of debts regularly develop significant challenges to be addressed, demonstrating that the debt metaphor may be used to reason about elements other than technical ones. It motivates us to create the new umbrella term”Non-Technical Debt” (NTD) to investigate people, processes, culture, social, and organizational concerns under its cover. All types of debt are similar in some ways, and they are often caused by making risky decisions. Therefore, ignoring any one dimension of debt can have severe consequences on the successful completion of SD projects. This study investigates recent literature on the current state of knowledge about NTD, its causes, and mitigation strategies. By using a thematic analysis approach, we found five NTD types (i.e., people, process, culture, social, and organizational). We further identified their accumulation causes and discussed remedies for mitigation. 

Large-scale agile frameworks suggest several practices for coordination between teams in software development projects. These prescribed coordination practices are often described as how to be performed in detail but without explaining the intended impacts. At the same time, agile values emphasise the need for tailoring practices that are not helpful. This study examines how three agile coordination practices influence accountability, predictability, and common understanding, which are important conditions for coordination. A qualitative research strategy was used to investigate three case organisations that implemented the scaled agile framework (SAFe): one bank, one government agency, and one department within the automotive industry. The empirical data consists of 28 semi-structured interviews and observations. The findings show the differing impacts of three investigated agile coordination practices and how the tailoring of practices affects coordination. 

Agile companies are not uniform. Consequently, agile transformations are conceived broadly, ranging from adopting agile methods and practices in software development teams or functions to building all-encompassing enterprise agility. Moreover, the targeted effects of agility may vary, and the success of transformations and the attainment of agility are measured in various ways. In this paper, based on a recent industrial survey study, we scrutinize holistically why companies want to transform, what types of agility they are aiming at, and how they gauge transformations. The survey data was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Most of the respondents were in large or very large companies in Finland and Sweden in diverse industry domains. The main findings indicate that there are many reasons for companies to transform both to improve external outcomes (fore mostly responsiveness) and to develop internal capabilities (adaptability, organizational learning). Companies seemed to have aims and goals with respect to all types of agility, including business agility. As the nature of transformations and the companies’ aims and goals vary, the transformations follow various means and measures. As a conclusion, for the hybrid era, we advise companies to consider how agility has benefited during the pandemic era, how hybrid work possibly affects the goals for agile transformations and the different facets of agility, and how to sustain agility in hybrid work.

Large-scale transformations of agile ways of working have received more attention in the industry in recent years. Some organizations have developed their own solutions for scaling, whereas many have chosen trademarked frameworks. In large-scale agile software development, many developers and development teams carry out work simultaneously. When autonomous teams need to coordinate toward a common goal, they must sacrifice some level of autonomy. Development, testing, and integrations need to be coordinated with other teams and aligned with an organization's programs or portfolio. Through the conducting of 28 interviews and 17 on-site visits, this multiple case study explored how team autonomy changed in three agile software development organizations that implemented the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The positive changes to team autonomy that they experienced as a result included getting a better overview, making better long-term decisions, giving and receiving help, and signaling limitations. We found two negative impacts on team autonomy: limited feature choice and enforced refinement. The study extends previous research on large-scale agile software development and improves our understanding of impacts on team autonomy.

Agile ways of working are nowadays used in many software development departments in larger organizations. When scaling up agile ways of working, new practices for coordinating teams become necessary, and many organizations are implementing the Scaled Agile Framework. The added practices for coordinating teams could have an impact on team performance, but they have not been much studied. In this study, data were obtained by means of a survey questionnaire that was answered by 201 employees from three organizations: one from the automotive industry, one government agency, and a business bank. The study suggests that efficient inter-team coordination does not have a positive relationship to team performance, which is contrary to previous studies. However, results suggests that a high level of psychological safety has a significant positive correlation to team performance. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

In software engineering, technical debt (TD) has been widely investigated, but debt regarding social issues, people, and processes has not been explored as much. It should be noted here that we use nontechnical debt (NTD) as an umbrella term to cover social, process, and people debts. Although the number of studies on NTD in software is increasing, the majority of them are descriptive rather than rigorous, and there is no systematic development of cumulative knowledge. As a result, identifying the fundamental causes of NTD and the associated mitigation techniques in software engineering is challenging. Therefore, this study investigates the scientific evidence regarding NTD till date by conducting a systematic mapping review of software engineering research between January 2000 and October 2021. The search strategy resulted in 175 studies, 17 of which were identified as unique and relevant primary papers. The primary studies show that NTD and TD are inextricably linked. In addition, this study also captured a plethora of causes and mitigation strategies for managing NTD and thus makes four important contributions: (i) highlighting state-of-the-art NTD research; (ii) identification of the reported causes and mitigation strategies in the primary papers; and (iii) determination of opportunities for future NTD research.

In 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic affected almost every company in some way also in the Nordic countries. Depending on the different industry sectors of the companies, the impacts have varied from minor risks to severe disruptions but also even booming businesses. In all, agility and resilience have been required to continue and even to survive. In 2018, we started conducting large-scale agile surveys in Finland and Sweden. For the 2020 survey round, we included questions about the current pandemic situation impacts and how agility has helped to respond. The respondents represented software professionals from different industries, not limited to information and communication technology (ICT) companies. The results indicate that although the perceived impacts have mostly been negative (53%), it is not all so. One-third (33%) reported positive impacts such as increased business and better well-being. The majority (55%) of the responses indicated that agility has helped to respond to the pandemic situation. Remarkably, 59% reported that their companies have improved agility during the past year. Improved agility appears to be positively related to the ability to respond to the pandemic. We did not discover significant differences between the Finnish and Swedish respondent cohorts.

Transforming into agile ways of working in large organizations can be performed in different ways. Many organizations choose a defined large-scale agile software development framework but how the transformation is carried out could be based on different sorts of logics. This paper investigates institutional logics at play in large-scale agile transformations. By studying two case organizations, the paper aims at improving our understanding of large-scale transformations by viewing software development as an institution. The findings displays diverse impacts due to two differing institutional logics when transforming into large-scale agile software development by implementing the Scaled Agile Framework. One contribution of this paper is to show the possibilities of using two institutional logics, Agile toolbox logic and Agile rulebook logic, for analyzing impacts of agile transformations.