Teams interactions hindering short-term and long-term business goals

Abstract

A known problem in large software companies is to balance the return on investment coming from short-term and long-term business goals dependent on the responsiveness of the companies. We have conducted an investigation on three large product line companies employing Agile software development (ASD) to better understand this problem: we have recognized several challenges that were hindering one or both kinds of business goals. Interaction challenges were quite critical among the Agile teams but also between the Agile team and other parts of the organization, such as architects and product management. We also further investigated which root factors were behind the interaction challenges, what symptoms can be recognized in the organization to spot the interaction challenges, and how they were related to the recent employment of ASD in the companies.