Abstract
Changing the development process of an organization is one of the toughest and riskiest decisions. This is particularly true if the known experiences and practices of the new considered ways of working are relative and subject to contextual assumptions. Spotify engineering culture is deemed as a new agile software development method which increasingly attracts large-scale organizations. The method relies on several small cross-functional self-organized teams (i.e., a squads). The squad autonomy is a key driver in Spotify method, where a squad decides what to do and how to do it. To enable effective squad autonomy, each squad shall be aligned with a mission, strategy, short-term goals and other squads. Since a little known about Spotify method, there is a need to answer the question of: How can organizations work out and maintain the alignment to enable loosely coupled and tightly aligned squads?
In this paper, we identify factors to support the alignment that are actually performed in practice but have never been discussed before in terms of Spotify method. We also present Spotify Tailoring by highlighting the modified and newly introduced processes to the method. Our work is based on a longitudinal embedded case study which was conducted in a real-world large-scale offshore software intensive organization that maintains mission-critical systems. According to the confidentiality agreement by the organization in question, we are not allowed to reveal detailed description of the features of the explored project.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bass, J.M.: How product owner teams scale agile methods to large distributed enterprises. Empir. Softw. Eng. 20(6), 1525–1557 (2015)
Bick, S., Scheerer, A., Spohrer, K.: Inter-team coordination in large agile software development settings: five ways of practicing agile at scale. In: Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016, XP 2016 Workshops, USA (2016)
Bjørnson, F.O., Vestues, K.: Knowledge sharing and process improvement in large-scale agile development. In: Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016, XP ’16 Workshops, pp. 7:1–7:5. ACM, New York (2016)
Campanelli, A.S., Parreiras, F.S.: Agile methods tailoring - a systematic literature review. J. Syst. Softw. 110, 85–100 (2015)
Corbin, J., Strauss, A., Strauss, A.L.: Basics of Qualitative Research, 4th edn. Sage, Thousand Oaks (2014)
Dikert, K., Paasivaara, M., Lassenius, C.: Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations: a systematic literature review. J. Syst. Softw. 119, 87–108 (2016)
Dingsøyr, T., Fægri, T.E., Itkonen, J.: What Is large in large-scale? a taxonomy of scale for agile software development. In: Jedlitschka, A., Kuvaja, P., Kuhrmann, M., Männistö, T., Münch, J., Raatikainen, M. (eds.) PROFES 2014. LNCS, vol. 8892, pp. 273–276. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13835-0_20
Dingsøyr, T., Moe, N.B.: Research challenges in large-scale agile software development. ACM SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 38(5), 38–39 (2013)
Dingsøyr, T., Moe, N.B., Fægri, T.E., Seim, E.A.: Exploring software development at the very large-scale: a revelatory case study and research agenda for agile method adaptation. Empir. Softw. Engg. 23(1), 490–520 (2018)
Drury, M., Conboy, K., Power, K.: Obstacles to decision making in agile software development teams. J. Syst. Softw. 85(6), 1239–1254 (2012). Special Issue: Agile Development
Dybå, T., Dingsøyr, T.: Empirical studies of agile software development: a systematic review. Inf. Softw. Technol. 50(9), 833–859 (2008)
Eckstein, J.: Sociocracy: an organization model for large-scale agile development. In: Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016, XP 2016 Workshops, pp. 6:1–6:5. ACM, New York (2016)
Fitzgerald, B., Stol, K.J.: Continuous software engineering: a roadmap and agenda. J. Syst. Softw. 123, 176–189 (2017)
Glaser, B.: “Naturalist inquiry” and grounded theory. Forum : Qual. Soc. Res. 5(1), 114–133 (2004)
Glaser, B.G.: Doing Grounded Theory: Issues and Discussions. Sociology Press, Mill Valley (1998)
Hildenbrand, T., Rothlauf, F., Geisser, M., Heinzl, A., Kude, T.: Approaches to collaborative software development. In: 2008 International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems, pp. 523–528, March 2008
Kniberg, H.: Spotify squad framework - part ii, April 2014. https://medium.com/project-management-learnings/spotify-squad-framework-part-ii-c5d4b9398c30
Kniberg, H.: Spotify squad framework - part i, January 2014. https://medium.com/project-management-learnings/spotify-squad-framework-part-i-8f74bcfcd761
Kniberg, H., Ivarsson, A.: Scaling agile spotify with tribes, squads, chapters & guilds, October 2012. https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
Kraut, R.E., Streeter, L.A.: Coordination in software development. Commun. ACM 38(3), 69–81 (1995)
Larman, C., Vodde, B.: Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum, 1st edn. Addison-Wesley Professional, Boston (2010)
Larman, C., Vodde, B.: Scaling agile development. CrossTalk 9, 8–12 (2013)
Leffingwell, D.: SAFe 4.0 Reference Guide: Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Software and Systems Engineering, 1st edn. Addison-Wesley Professional, Boston (2016)
Melo, C., Cruzes, D., Kon, F., Conradi, R.: Interpretative case studies on agile team productivity and management. Inf. Softw. Technol. 55, 412–427 (2013)
Moe, N.B., Aurum, A., Dybå, T.: Challenges of shared decision-making: a multiple case study of agile software development. Inf. Softw. Technol. 54(8), 853–865 (2012)
Moe, N.B., Olsson, H.H., Dingsøyr, T.: Trends in large-scale agile development: a summary of the 4th workshop at XP2016. In: Proceedings of the Scientific Workshop Proceedings of XP2016, p. 1. ACM (2016)
Myers, M., Newman, M.: The qualitative interview in is research: examining the craft. Inf. Organ. 17(1), 2–26 (2007)
Nerur, S.: Acceptance of software process innovations the case of extreme programming. Eur. J. Inf. Syst. 18(4), 344–354 (2009)
Paasivaara, M., Lassenius, C., Heikkilä, V.T.: Inter-team coordination in large-scale globally distributed scrum: do scrum-of-scrums really work? In: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pp. 235–238, September 2012
Robinson, H., Segal, J., Sharp, H.: Ethnographically-informed empirical studies of software practice. Inf. Softw. Technol. 49(6), 540–551 (2007)
Rolland, K.H., Fitzgerald, B., Dingsoyr, T., Stol, K.J.: Problematizing agile in the large: alternative assumptions for large-scale agile development. In: ICIS 2016 PROCEEDINGS : 37 International Conference on Information Systems (2016)
Runeson, P., Hőst, M.: Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Int. J. 14(2), 131–164 (2009)
Saeeda, H., Arif, F., Minhas, N.M., Humayun, M.: Agile scalability for large scale projects: lessons learned (report). J. Softw. 10(7), 893 (2015)
Scheerer, A., Hildenbrand, T., Kude, T.: Coordination in large-scale agile software development: a multiteam systems perspective. In: 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 4780–4788, January 2014
Sutharshan, A., Maj, S.: An evaluation of agile software methodology techniques. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Netw. Secur. 10(12), 68–71 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Salameh, A., Bass, J. (2018). Influential Factors of Aligning Spotify Squads in Mission-Critical and Offshore Projects – A Longitudinal Embedded Case Study. In: Kuhrmann, M., et al. Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11271. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03672-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03673-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)