Challenges and Success Factors for Metrics in Large-Scale Agile Development

Contemporary organizations widely use agile software development to react to unpredictable changes in their business environment. Due to the success of agile methods in contexts similar to the agile sweet spot, organizations have been applying them on a larger scale. However, maintaining oversight in large-scale agile development remains a problem. Metrics can tackle this problem by increasing transparency, but organizations have struggled with their adoption. Furthermore, extant research on large-scale agile development lacks publications investigating metric challenges and success factors. Against this backdrop, we conducted an expert interview study with 23 experts from 13 organizations. The most mentioned challenges are data collection challenges, lack of metric usefulness, and metric calculation challenges. On the other hand, the most occurring success factors are context-dependent metric adoption, implementing an agile metric management process, and ensuring understanding of the metric purpose.