Our Journey to Becoming Agile: Experiences with Agile Transformation in Samsung Electronics

Abstract

For traditional consumer electronics companies, it is important that requirements are clearly described and design based on the requirement analysis is well-defined in the early phases of a project, because well-defined design and interfaces guarantee that all necessary tasks for the project are identified and assigned to the appropriate teams to maximize the constructive interactions among multiple teams. There are several benefits to this; however, there are also some weaknesses. Changing or adding features are usually not permitted, and 'organizational silos' that decrease efficient cooperation among teams are inadvertently formed. We thought that our company could overcome these weaknesses using agile development methodologies, so we decided to transform our organization to become more agile from being reliant on traditional development process. In this paper, we describe our efforts to achieve this agile transformation including our road map, process revision, master plan to adopt engineering practices, cross functional team formations, and cultivation of an agile culture.