Towards Rapid Releases in Large-Scale XaaS Development at Ericsson: A Case Study

Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) is a cloud computing term for the extensive variety of services and applications emerging for users to access on demand over the Internet. In this paper, we describe how Ericsson built a new R&D product development program developing a XaaS platform and a related set of services. As the goal is continuous feature delivery, their R&D organization, distributed to five sites at two continents has recently adopted Lean and Agile software development. We collected data by conducting 32 semi-structured interviews during visits at four sites and four observation sessions at three sites. We describe how this organization has experimented with different set-ups for their tens of agile teams aiming for rapid end-to-end development: from component-based virtual teams to totally cross-functional, cross-component, cross-site teams. Moreover, we discuss the challenges that this organization has faced and how they have mitigated them.