ScaleWise

ScaleWise

Project status

Ongoing

Project Manager

Darja

Darja Smite


darja.smite@bth.se

Category/Area

Research in Software Engineering

Project ScaleWise is dedicated to the organizational scaling and onboarding processes when integrating large number of new hires in ongoing software product development organizations. The project seeks answers to the following questions: What are the true effects of scaling on product and organizational performance (cost, productivity, quality and culture)? Which sourcing strategies are efficient for scaling (scaling up internally versus scaling out with own sites or external suppliers)? What helps teams, product environments and organizations scale successfully?

Background: Organizational scaling in companies developing large and complex products often negatively impacts product quality, time-to-market, and user satisfaction, because the amount of knowledge to learn for such development is huge. Scaling is more challenging if it implies onboarding large number of employees that significantly lowers the overall level of competence in the product organization, if it occurs remotely, and especially when adding locations with high turnover rates and no local experts. Unplanned scaling may lead to significant performance gaps growing beyond the recovery possibility. Yet, the true implications of scaling and ways to scale are neither systematically evaluated, nor well understood.

Why are these problems unsolved: Even though global software development challenges are well researched, organizational learning with respect to offshore sourcing has been slow and not passed well within and across organizations. This might be also because today’s large-scale projects are so large, complex and unique that there is a limited ability to learn from previous efforts. Besides, little is known about “mega” large-scale environments (hundreds of teams) and onboarding hundreds of engineers in ongoing products, about estimating and controlling scaling impacts, and choosing effective learning strategies.

Focus of the project: ScaleWise is set to perform a holistic study of scaling processes aiming to build a theory and taking into account the team, product and organizational perspectives (socio-technical aspects). Our goal is to understand the trade-offs when scaling locally vs remotely, preventive actions and practices that minimize negative impacts of scaling on performance (cost, productivity and quality) and develop a set of actionable recommendations for scaling and onboarding.

Facts

Duration

2020-2023

Budget

5.9Mkr

Contact Person

Darja

Darja Smite

darja.smite@bth.se

Partners and Financiers

Participants

Darja Smite

Darja Smite
Professor

Javier Gonzalez Huerta

Javier Gonzalez Huerta
Biträdande professor/Viceprefekt

Michael  Dorner

Michael Dorner
PhD Student

Eriks Klotins

Eriks Klotins
Senior lecturer

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