  Driven by the need to coordinate activities of multiple agile development
teams cooperating to produce a large software product, software-intensive
organizations are turning to scaling agile software development frameworks.
Despite the growing adoption of various scalin g agile frameworks, there is
little empirical evidence of how effective their practices are in mitigating
risk, especially in global software develop ment (GSD), where project failure
is a known problem.
  In this study, we develop a GSD Risk Catalog of 63 risks to assess the degree
to which two scaling agile frameworks--Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and the
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)--address software project risks in GSD. We
examined data from two longitudinal case studies implementing each framework to
identify the extent to which the framework practices address GSD risks.
  Scaling agile frameworks appear to help companies eliminate or mitigate many
traditional risks in GSD, especially relating to users and customers. How ever,
several important risks were not eliminated or mitigated. These persistent
risks in the main belonged to the Environment quadrant highlighting t he
inherent risk in developing software across geographic boundaries. Perhaps
these frameworks (and arguably any framework), would have difficulty all
eviating, issues that appear to be outside the immediate control of the
organization.
