Inter-Team Coordination in Agile Development: Learning from Non-Software Contexts

Abstract

As agile development is increasingly pursuing its relevance for large-scale development, the focus on coordination shifts from an intra-team perspective to an inter-team perspective. However, inter-team coordination in large-scale agile software development is still an understudied subject and has become one of the main challenges for researchers and practitioners in the field. Based on an ongoing ethnographic study we propose that relevant learnings about inter-team coordination can be made from non-software development. To illustrate this we provide the example of mechanical integration engineers and their work in large-scale and complex hardware development.