Modeling and Analysis of Boundary Objects and Methodological Islands in Large-Scale Systems Development

TL;DR

This paper introduces a metamodel to analyze coordination and knowledge sharing challenges caused by boundary objects and methodological islands in large-scale systems development, aiding practitioners in improving collaboration.

Contribution

It presents a novel metamodel for capturing coordination practices and introduces 'bad smells' to identify issues in large-scale agile development environments.

Findings

Identified common coordination issues in large-scale projects.

Developed a set of 'bad smells' for detecting problems.

Validated the model with four large companies.

Abstract

Large-scale companies commonly face the challenge of managing relevant knowledge between different organizational groups, particularly in increasingly agile contexts. In previous studies, we found the importance of analyzing methodological islands (i.e., groups using different development methods than the surrounding organization) and boundary objects between them. In this paper, we propose a metamodel to better capture and analyze coordination and knowledge management in practice. Such a metamodel can allow practitioners to describe current practices, analyze issues, and design better-suited coordination mechanisms. We evaluated the conceptual model together with four large-scale companies developing complex systems. In particular, we derived an initial list of bad smells that can be leveraged to detect issues and devise suitable improvement strategies for inter-team coordination in large-scale development. We present the model, smells, and our evaluation results.