User involvement is essential for aligning software systems with organizational needs in agile development; however, achieving meaningful engagement becomes challenging in large-scale settings. Large organizations may contain distributed teams and diverse user groups whose limited availability and unfamiliarity with agile practices hinder sustained involvement. Although participatory and user-centered approaches work in smaller contexts, they are challenging to scale, leaving a gap in how to organize user involvement across dispersed organizations and multiple development teams. To address this gap, the present study examines pilot testing in a large-scale agile environment. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a Norwegian public organization, based on interviews with 35 participants from development and user groups, the study defines iterative pilot testing as a scalable practice in which unfinished yet operational solutions are refined gradually through user involvement when functionality is novel or complex. The study demonstrates how this practice can make development work more visible, enable development teams to be closer to their users and their work practices, and facilitate teams in navigating cultural and functional differences, thereby strengthening user involvement in large-scale agile software development.
Software development in critical healthcare domains presents unique challenges due to the non-deterministic nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Traditional agile frameworks often face friction when aligning the exploratory cycles of model training with fixed sprint cadences. This paper presents a case study on the development of a mobile application for diabetes patient support, powered by a specialized Large Language Model (LLM). The project adapted Scrum ceremonies to manage the full AI lifecycle, from corpus preparation to clinical validation. We identify four key challenges, specifically the insufficiency of automated metrics (e.g., BERTScore) to ensure medical safety and the limitations of standard “Definition of Done” (DoD) in experimental contexts. As a solution, we implement “hybrid sprints” incorporating “question stories” and multi-level acceptance criteria that prioritize clinical expert validation over technical scores. The results demonstrate that while standard agile methods provide a foundation, they require pragmatic decoupling of data and model lifecycles to ensure safety-critical value delivery.
While Generative AI (GenAI) has rapidly transformed software development and GenAI tools receive widespread adoption, how humans and AI should collaborate has become a focal point for Agile practitioners, whose values emphasise teamwork and collaboration. Yet, despite growing interest, research on human-AI collaboration in software engineering, especially within Agile contexts, remains limited. Our study investigates Agile practitioners’ perceptions of collaborating with GenAI in software development activities. We conducted a survey with 73 Agile practitioners, revealing how they currently collaborate with GenAI across various activities and how they expect this collaboration to evolve. Key findings include that GenAI is currently not a substantial part of real-world workflows, being either unused or limited to an assistant role, but that there is a clear tendency towards greater AI involvement in the future, with practitioners increasingly viewing AI as a collaborator rather than merely a tool. These findings advance our understanding of human-AI collaboration in Agile settings and can guide both future research and the practical adoption of GenAI in Agile environments.
Agile Requirements Engineering (Agile RE) has been widely studied, but gaps remain regarding how user-centered research practices, specifically UX Research, are integrated into Agile RE. This paper investigates how UX Research is applied within Agile RE activities and identifies the positive and negative aspects of this integration. We conducted a multiple-case study with four distinct organizations, collecting data through interviews with 12 agile and UX professionals. Our results revealed that UX Research practices and tools are most frequently employed to discover requirements, both in organizations with and without UX professionals. However, the findings also indicate that although UX Research practices provide valuable input for requirements specification, there remains a need to better structure and communicate UX-related aspects so they become more visible to the agile team in all Agile RE activities. Our study contributes by discussing how UX Research practices and tools are employed across the stages of the Agile RE cycle, as well as the roles of the different stakeholders involved in these stages in different companies.
Agile coaches play a key role in supporting software teams and organisations during agile transformations, yet little is known about how they understand and design for the continuation of agility after their involvement ends. This study fills that research gap by examining how agile coaches perceive post-exit outcomes and describing the strategies they use to support endurance beyond their engagement. Drawing on sixteen semi-structured interviews with professional agile coaches across multiple organisations, we identify six interconnected themes that capture coaches’ accounts of embedding routines, transferring ownership, and aligning agile values with organisational contexts. We synthesise these themes into the concept of sustainment work, referring to the professional and organisational efforts that coaches describe undertaking to support the continuation of agile ways of working beyond their direct involvement. This synthesis is represented in an empirically derived model comprising three interrelated domains: Embedding Practices, Enabling Ownership, and Aligning Culture. The model reflects how coaches conceptualise the relationship between their interventions, anticipated post-exit trajectories, and the endurance of agile practices, rather than providing evidence of long-term organisational outcomes. The paper contributes theoretically grounded insights into how agility is understood and approached by highlighting coaches’ perceptions and intended sustainment strategies, as an ongoing organisational concern rather than a time-bound coaching intervention.
