  Large-scale companies commonly face the challenge of managing relevant
knowledge between different organizational groups, particularly in increasingly
agile contexts. In previous studies, we found the importance of analyzing
methodological islands (i.e., groups using different development methods than
the surrounding organization) and boundary objects between them. In this paper,
we propose a metamodel to better capture and analyze coordination and knowledge
management in practice. Such a metamodel can allow practitioners to describe
current practices, analyze issues, and design better-suited coordination
mechanisms. We evaluated the conceptual model together with four large-scale
companies developing complex systems. In particular, we derived an initial list
of bad smells that can be leveraged to detect issues and devise suitable
improvement strategies for inter-team coordination in large-scale development.
We present the model, smells, and our evaluation results.
