Agile Methods for Large Organizations - Building Communities of Practice

Abstract

Agile development practices respect tacit knowledge, makes communication more effective, and thus fosters the knowledge creation process. However the current agile methods, like XP, are focused on practices that individual teams or projects need, and the use of the methods in organizations consisting of multiple cooperating teams is difficult. The community of practice theory suggests that large agile organizations should have various overlapping, informal cross-team communities. This paper studies three agile methods developed at Nokia that use facilitated workshops to solve multiteam issues. The paper explains using communities of practices theory - why these methods work in multiteam settings. The results of this paper suggest that workshop practices that amass people from different parts of organizations to perform a specific well-defined task can be used effectively to solve issues that span over multiple teams and to build up communities of practice. This result suggests that the community of practice concept could provide a basis for adapting agile methods for the needs of large organizations.