Agile software development (ASD) methods emphasize close collaboration and constant communication between software professionals and other stakeholders. While an increasing number of organizations have adopted ASD methods in large-scale projects, their implementation at scale has proven challenging when numerous developers and teams collaborate.

Due to the size and complexity of large-scale ASD projects, interpersonal interactions and collaborations become challenging, and it becomes difficult to align and coordinate multiple development teams working on different parts of a project or product. Therefore, large-scale ASD faces a variety of social issues related to team and project management, inter-team collaboration, and customer collaboration, as well as learning and its underlying activities.

A significant contributing factor in large-scale ASD is a lack of psychological safety, which negatively affects collaboration, knowledge sharing, and performance.

Based on Research

Ahmad, M. O., Ghanbari, H., Gustavsson, T., & Upreti, B. R. (2025). It all starts with structure: investigating learning dynamics in large-scale agile software development. Journal of Systems and Software, 230, 112561.

Learn more about Hadi Ghanbari’s research.