Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations - A research proposal and a pilot study

Agile methods have become an appealing alternative for large companies striving to improve their performance, even though the methods were originally designed for small, single teams. Our recently performed systematic literature review on large-scale agile transformations revealed that despite the popularity of the topic in the industry, it has received very little research attention, as almost 90% of the selected papers were experience reports. In our literature study, we identified 35 challenges grouped into nine categories, and 29 success factors grouped into eleven categories. In this research proposal we suggest a survey research to understand these factors with a larger population of companies. The purpose is to validate and deepen our literature study findings. We report the findings from a pilot study performed in the XP2016 Large-scale agile workshop, where we received 19 answers to the survey and several comments from 16 persons participating in the WorldCafe discussion groups. The improved survey will be rolled out to a large number of companies.