In large-scale agile software development, many teams work together to achieve overarching project goals. The more teams, the greater the coordination requirements. Despite the growing popularity of large-scale agile, inter-team coordination is challenging to practice and research. We conducted a case study over 1.5 years in a large-scale software development firm to better understand which inter-team coordination mechanisms are used in large-scale agile and how they support inter-team coordination. Based on a thematic analysis of 31 interviews, 113 hours of observations, and supplemental material, we identified 27 inter-team coordination mechanisms. From this, we offer the following contributions. First, we propose a taxonomy of inter-team coordination with three categories: coordination meetings, such as communities of practice, inter-team stand-ups, and retrospectives; coordination roles, such as the program architects and the platform team; and coordination tools and artefacts, such as Slack and JIRA as well as inter-team task boards, product backlogs, and roadmaps. Second, the coordination mechanisms displayed combinations of four key characteristics, technical, organizational, physical, and social (TOPS), which form the basis of the TOPS framework to capture the multifaceted characteristics of coordination mechanisms. Technical relates to the software product and/or technical tools supporting software development. Organizational pertains to the structural aspects of the organization. Physical refers to tangible or spatial characteristics. Social captures interpersonal and community-based characteristics. Finally, the taxonomy and the TOPS framework provide a knowledge base and a structured approach for researchers to study as well as for software practitioners to understand and improve inter-team coordination in large-scale agile.

中文翻译：

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大规模敏捷中团队间协调机制的分类

在大规模敏捷软件开发中，许多团队一起工作以实现总体项目目标。团队越多，对协调的要求就越大。尽管大规模敏捷越来越受欢迎，但团队间的协调对实践和研究具有挑战性。我们在一家大型软件开发公司进行了超过 1.5 年的案例研究，以更好地了解在大规模敏捷中使用了哪些团队间协调机制以及它们如何支持团队间协调。基于对 31 次访谈、113 小时的观察和补充材料的主题分析，我们确定了 27 种团队间协调机制。由此，我们提供以下贡献。首先，我们提出了一种团队间协调的分类法，分为三类：协调会议，例如实践社区，团队间的站会和回顾；协调角色，例如程序架构师和平台团队；协调工具和工件，例如 Slack 和 JIRA，以及团队间任务板、产品待办事项列表和路线图。其次，协调机制显示了技术、组织、物理和社会（TOPS）四个关键特征的组合，它们构成了 TOPS 框架的基础，以捕捉协调机制的多方面特征。技术涉及支持软件开发的软件产品和/或技术工具。组织与组织的结构方面有关。物理是指有形或空间特征。社交捕捉人际关系和基于社区的特征。最后，分类法和 TOPS 框架提供了一个知识库和结构化方法，供研究人员研究以及软件从业者理解和改进大规模敏捷中的团队间协调。