By Dr. Hadi Ghanbari, Assistant Professor at Aalto Univeristy, Academic Fellow at Center for Digital Business Growth
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.