Transition from Plan-Driven to Agile: An Action Research

Nowadays, many individuals and teams involved on projects are already using agile development techniques as part of their daily work. However, we have much less experience in how to scale and manage agile practices in distributed software development. At this level, there is an increasing need to standardize best practices to avoid reinvention and miscommunication across artifacts and processes. So, the emerging growth of frameworks i.e.; Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe^®) in industry requires an academic attention because SAFe^® does not cover all aspects of agility required in a distributed environment context. Early adopter of SAFe^® also reported that, geographically distributed teams experience lower productivity due to lack of alignment and solid program execution. On the other hand, Global Teaming Model (GTM) places particular emphasis on the organization and management of globally distributed development teams, it does not specify how to develop software using Agile and Lean principles. Furthermore, the GTM recommended practices are normative, and do not prescribe how to implement the practice. Thus, we hypothesize that combining SAFe^® practices, together with GTM recommendations will provide practitioners with a framework of implementable practices.