Mining Dependencies in Large-Scale Agile Software Development Projects: A Quantitative Industry Study

Context: Coordination in large-scale software development is critical yet difficult, as it faces the problem of dependency management and resolution. In this work, we focus on managing requirement dependencies that in Agile software development (ASD) come in the form of user stories. Objective: This work studies decisions of large-scale Agile teams regarding identification of dependencies between user stories. Our goal is to explain detection of dependencies through users’ behavior in large-scale, distributed projects. Method: We perform empirical evaluation on a large real-world dataset from an Agile software organization, provider of a leading software for Agile project management. We mine the usage data of the Agile Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool to extract large-scale development project data for more than 70 teams running over a five-year period. Results: Our results demonstrate that dependencies among user stories are not frequently observed (the problem affects around 10% of user stories), however, their implications on large-scale ASD are considerable. Dependencies have impact on software releases and increase work coordination complexity for members of different teams. Conclusion: Requirement dependencies undermine Agile teams’ autonomy and are difficult to manage at scale. We conclude that leveraging ALM monitoring data to automatically detect dependencies could help Agile teams address work coordination needs and manage risks related to dependencies in a timely manner.