Towards Rapid Releases in Large-Scale XaaS Development at Ericsson: A Case Study

TLDR

XaaS refers to a broad range of cloud services and applications that users can access on demand over the Internet. The paper describes Ericsson’s creation of a new R&D product development program for a XaaS platform and its associated services. Ericsson’s distributed R&D organization, spanning five sites across two continents, adopted Lean and Agile practices, gathered data through 32 semi‑structured interviews and observation sessions, experimented with various agile team configurations to enable rapid end‑to‑end development, and addressed the challenges that arose.

Abstract

Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) is a cloud computing term for the extensive variety of services and applications emerging for users to access on demand over the Internet. In this paper, we describe how Ericsson built a new R&D product development program developing a XaaS platform and a related set of services. As the goal is continuous feature delivery, their R&D organization, distributed to five sites at two continents has recently adopted Lean and Agile software development. We collected data by conducting 32 semi-structured interviews during visits at four sites and four observation sessions at three sites. We describe how this organization has experimented with different set-ups for their tens of agile teams aiming for rapid end-to-end development: from component-based virtual teams to totally cross-functional, cross-component, cross-site teams. Moreover, we discuss the challenges that this organization has faced and how they have mitigated them.