Influential factors of aligning Spotify squads in mission-critical and offshore projects – a longitudinal embedded case study

Salameh, A; Bass, J

Abstract

Changing the development process of an organization is one of the toughest and riskiest decisions. This is particularly true if the known experiences and practices of the new considered ways of working are relative and subject to contextual assumptions. Spotify engineering culture is deemed as a new agile software development method which increasingly attracts large-scale organizations. The method relies on several small cross-functional self-organized teams (i.e., squads). The squad autonomy is a key driver in Spotify method, where a squad decides what to do and how to do it. To enable effective squad autonomy, each squad shall be aligned with a mission, strategy, short-term goals and other squads. Since a little known about Spotify method, there is a need to answer the question of: How can organizations work out and maintain the alignment to enable loosely coupled and tightly aligned squads?

In this paper, we identify factors to support the alignment that is actually performed in practice but have never been discussed before in terms of Spotify method. We also present Spotify Tailoring by highlighting the modified and newly introduced processes to the method. Our work is based on a longitudinal embedded case study which was conducted in a real-world large-scale offshore software intensive organization that maintains mission-critical systems. According to the confidentiality agreement by the organization in question, we are not allowed to reveal a detailed description of the features of the explored project.

Citation

Salameh, A., & Bass, J. (2018). Influential factors of aligning Spotify squads in mission-critical and offshore projects – a longitudinal embedded case study. #Journal not on list, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_15

• Journal Article Type: Conference Paper
• Conference Name: 19th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
• Conference Location: Wolfsburg, Germany
• Acceptance Date: Jul 16, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Nov 3, 2018
• Publication Date: Nov 30, 2018
• Deposit Date: Mar 11, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 11, 2020
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Series Number: 11271
• Book Title: Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
• ISBN: 9783030036720-(print);-9783030036737-(eBook)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_15