Agile development in large and distributed environments: A systematic literature review on organizational, managerial and cultural aspects

Agile Software Development has been around for more than a decade. Over this period, the focus of applications, problems and consequently research themes has been changed dramatically. However, the main efforts have been arguably yielded to employ agile development in large and distributed environments. This imposes sophisticated needs to deal with e.g. project definition and management in such environments, as well as techniques and methods for communication, coordination, collaboration, etc., and even, the resulting cultural and organizational problems. This paper provides a systematic literature review in which main problems and themes of agile software development in large organizations, systems or projects and/or in distributed teams and environments have been sought and classified. The source of data is limited to IEEE publishing whether conferences or journals, and from 2005 onward. The results show that the major problems chronologically began with issues of cultural readiness, method implementation/adoption and project management, and then for the most recent years, the emphasis has been mainly switched to quality management as well as communication and collaboration mechanisms. Meanwhile, the results also reveal that indeed large organizations are even more eager and pioneer to transition to agile development due to their high degrees of cost as well as competitiveness. This fact paves the way to use their valuable, early experiences for other large as well as medium and small teams and organizations particularly those who have not switched yet. The study ends up with a few predictions for the future of agile development research themes in large and distributed environments.