A New Approach for Distributed Software Engineering Teams Based on Kanban Method for Reducing Dependency

Abstract

In today's globalization with the shift towards Agility. Agile practices highly evaluates communication to achieve improvement in the software development process and among development team members. Stable communication can be difficult and a challenge in distributed agile environment. Pointless communications and actions in software development projects do not decrease work in progress and may cause failure. Getting rid of such a waste leads to a continuous flow process improvement, decreasing team dependency. This is astudy of a distributed Kanban, for web portal as a proposed solution for mitigating the communication challenges encountered in such environment. The declared benefits of Kanban have gained. significant importance as an agile project management method in the software development industry. Kanban approach helps managing and measuring the flow of work across developing teams. Results show that Kanban has a positive effect, leading the team to communicate together when it is needed. Compared to the previously used Scrum method by the sample teams, the use of Kanban causes dependency reduction for the distributed team by 27%, keeping the pace of the development harmonized across the whole team and improving maturity. This led to 98.9 of a done status for user stories, and 30% customer satisfaction increase.

Experiences and Lessons Learned from Real-World Projects in Software Engineering Subject

“…This can encourage all members to work together in group projects [22]. A Kanban survey indicates a 72% reduction in dependency while maintaining a consistent development pace across the team [23]. But the Kanban board may result in the teams working on smaller user stories over the larger ones which can lead to uneven task distributions in the teams [24].…”

Improving Coordination and Communication in Distributed Software Development through Context-Based Software Artifacts Awareness: A Controlled Experiment

“…In this scenario, the software development is carried out collaboratively by distributed teams, featuring the Distributed Software Development (DSD). However, this development strategy has brought challenges related to communication, coordination and cooperation for the software projects caused by the geographical and temporal distance between the teams (Herbsleb et al, 2000;Herbsleb and Moitra, 2001;Damian, 2002;Hargreaves and Damian, 2004;Layman et al, 2006;Sangwan et al, 2006;Jiménez et al, 2010;Ivcek and Galinac;Yacoub et al, 2016). According to Herbsleb and Moitra (2001), in distributed environments, the communication channels and the ability of developers to work together are reduced.…”