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Link to original content: https://doi.org/10.1145/3611643.3613886

The Most Agile Teams Are the Most Disciplined: On Scaling out Agile Development | Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

research-article

The Most Agile Teams Are the Most Disciplined: On Scaling out Agile Development

Authors:

Austen RainerAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2023: Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 2056 - 2061

https://doi.org/10.1145/3611643.3613886

Published: 30 November 2023 Publication History

Abstract

As one of the next frontiers of software engineering, agile development at scale has attracted more and more research interests and efforts. When following the existing autonomy-focused and goal-driven lessons and guidelines to scale agile development for a large astronomy project, however, we encountered surprising tech stack sprawl and spreading team coordination issues. By revisiting the unique features of our project (e.g., the data processing-intensive nature and the frequent team member changes), and by identifying a fractal pattern from various data processing logic and processes, we defined disciplined agile teams to clone the best practices of pioneer agile teams, and to work on similar system modules with similar user stories. Such a targeted strategy effectively relieved the tech stack sprawl and facilitated teamwork handover, at least for refactoring and growing the data processing modules in our project. Based on this emerging result and our reflections, we distinguish this targeted strategy as scaling out agile development from the existing agile scaling approaches that are generally in a scaling-up fashion. Considering the popularity of data processing-intensive projects, and also considering the pervasive fractal patterns in modern businesses and organisations, we claim that this targeted strategy still has broad application opportunities. Therefore, developing a well-defined methodology for scaling out agility, and combining both scaling up and scaling out agility, will deserve attentions and new research efforts in the future.

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Cited By

Li ZSaldías-Vallejos NSeco DRodríguez MRanjan R(2024)Long Live the Image: On Enabling Resilient Production Database Containers for Microservice ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.343662350:9(2363-2378)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3436623

Index Terms

The Most Agile Teams Are the Most Disciplined: On Scaling out Agile Development
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
    2. Software development process management
      1. Software development methods
        Agile software development
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Distributed systems organizing principles
      2. Ultra-large-scale systems

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cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE 2023: Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2023

2215 pages

ISBN:9798400703270

DOI:10.1145/3611643

General Chair:
Satish Chandra
Google, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Kelly Blincoe
University of Auckland, New Zealand
,
Paolo Tonella
USI Lugano, Switzerland

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

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Published: 30 November 2023

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ESEC/FSE '23

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ESEC/FSE '23: 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

December 3 - 9, 2023

CA, San Francisco, USA

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Cited By

Li ZSaldías-Vallejos NSeco DRodríguez MRanjan R(2024)Long Live the Image: On Enabling Resilient Production Database Containers for Microservice ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.343662350:9(2363-2378)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3436623

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