Meetings often dominate software projects. Despite frequent dissatisfaction within meetings, many software engineers are not aware of the crucial importance about their behavior. This can set the tone for the entire project and influence the success. In a study based on 32 student development teams with 155 participants, we observed the participants' interactions during the first internal team meeting. Analyzing the observations showed that constructive remarks had a positive impact on positive group affect tone. However, this effect can only be observed when supportive utterances followed constructive remarks. In the article, we show a complete mediation of this statistically significant effect, e.g., about seemingly subtle interaction patterns that influence group affect tone. We also propose practical interventions on how software projects could benefit from supportive meeting behavior. This summary refers to the article "Positive affect through interactions in meetings: The role of proactive and supportive statements" [Sc18] published in the Journal of Systems & Software in 2018 (vol. 143).

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The more members a team has, the more information needs to be shared with single team members or within the whole team. Sufficient information sharing is difficult to ensure, since a project leader will not be fully aware of all ongoing information and communication within the team. In software engineering, information flow is essential for project success. In each part of the process, information like requirements or design decisions needs to be communicated with appropriate persons. Neither missing nor wrong implemented requirements are desirable, since extra working hours or incomplete working results need to be paid. Therefore, the right amount of information sharing is highly desirable. To ensure this, communication is a mandatory requisite. Furthermore, knowing about social conflicts is suitable, since these influence the information flow. In an experiment with 34 student software projects, we collected data referring to internal team communication and mood. In these projects, we could show a correlation between chosen communication channels, social conflicts and mood. Since social conflicts foster an insufficient information flow, knowing about these helps software developing teams to reach higher quality and a higher customer satisfaction. motivated by the importance of information sharing within the project team, communication has been proven to be a determinant of project success [19]. In software developing teams, wrong or insufficiently transmitted requirements often cause wrong or not implemented parts of the software [27]. Therefore, insufficient communication can threaten project success. Otherwise, adequate communication can foster project success. Hence, a good working communication is desirable for all project members: The developer team that does not want to spend time on implementing unnecessary program code, the project leader who wants to complete the tasks, and lastly the customer who wants a successful project. But not only requirements need to be shared within the team. Also design decisions, customized standards, reports about bugs and many other information need to be transported to the relevant persons. As Stapel [30] pointed out, not only the intensity of communication, but also the chosen communication channel is important for transmitting the desired information. In the "Modes of Communication", Cockburn [5] rated different kind of communication channels by their effectiveness and richness. Among other characteristics like synchronicity, the perceptions addressed by the media channels are one factor for the grading. For example, meetings with face to face communication-in physical support with a white board-are the most effective way to communicate [1][5]. As teams often do not have the opportunity to meet regularly and since meetings often do not suffice for conveying the entire information at hand, other ways of information sharing need to be used. In practice, common alternatives are services like email, video chat, telephone or group and single chat. Schneider et al. [26] develo...

Modern-day communication in teams is characterized by a frequent and flexible use of various communication technologies. To understand the relationship between this new way of communication and team performance, research suggests incorporating contextual factors. In this study, we explore the role of demographic faultlines and subsequent subgroup formation using data from 164 students nested in 34 software engineering teams working together over the course of 14 weeks. Multilevel modeling revealed a three-way interaction between media richness, communication intensity, and demographic faultlines on team performance. Weak faultline teams evaluated their performance more positively when they compensated for low communication intensity by using richer communication channels and vice versa. In contrast, strong faultline teams were less able to adapt their communication behavior to increase performance. We discuss theoretical implications for team communication and diversity research and provide guidelines for improving communication in diverse teams.

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