Planning large-scale agile development using a dependency structure mapping model

Abstract

Efforts to plan and coordinate complex software development using large-scale agile coordination techniques are recent phenomena. Some methodologies such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) attempt to provide a set of processes to help engineering teams who work on complex projects with significant coordination needs plan together while preserving agility at the team level. Are there existing system engineering techniques which can prove helpful as part of these methodologies? This thesis looks at one such technique - Dependency Structure Mapping (DSM) - in order to address a set of identified limitations of the program increment (PI) planning activity within SAFe. In doing so, this thesis illustrates how dependency data are assembled into a DSM model for a PI. It then applies the proposed model within a field study and discusses the results.