Rapid Delivery of Software: The Effect of Alignment on Time to Market

Abstract

In Scrum, teams working collaboratively on interdependent pieces of software face alignment issues as they need to coordinate their work. Organisations aim to minimise time to market of their products, which makes it relevant to identify how alignment issues affect time to market. Currently, empirical evidence of the effect of implementing alignment activities on delivering software is scarce. This research aims to identify those alignment activities that shorten the time to market of backlog items. First, examination of key concepts led to a grounded choice of alignment activities taken into account. Use of alignment activities in development of features was identified by sending feature owners a close-ended questionnaire on the alignment of their collaborating Scrum teams. The cycle times of backlog items were measured by using the application programmable interface of the agile tool used for tracking backlog items. Results show that when user stories were developed using a shared Definition of Ready, process and lead time decreased significantly. Process and lead time also differed between user stories implementing a different number of shared feedback sessions, where using two shared feedback sessions per sprint resulted in the lowest process and lead time.