Information Flows at Inter-team Boundaries in Agile Information Systems Development

Abstract

I nfo r m a tio n flow s a t in t e r-t e a m b o u n d a ri e s in a gil e info r m a tio n sy s t e m s d e v elo p m e n t R a hy, S a n d B a s s, J h t t p:// dx. d oi.o r g/ 1 0. 1 0 0 7/ 9 7 8-3-0 3 0-1 1 3 9 5-7_3 8 Ti t l e Info r m a tio n flow s a t in t e r-t e a m b o u n d a ri e s in a gil e info r m a tio n sy s t e m s d ev elo p m e n t A u t h o r s R a hy, S a n d B a s s, J Typ e Co nf e r e n c e o r Work s h o p It e m U RL This ve r sio n is a v ail a bl e a t : h t t p:// u sir.s alfo r d. a c. u k/id/ e p ri n t/ 4 8 2 0 0/ P u b l i s h e d D a t e 2 0 1 8 U SIR is a di git al c oll e c tio n of t h e r e s e a r c h o u t p u t of t h e U niv e r si ty of S alfo r d. W h e r e c o py ri g h t p e r mi t s, full t e x t m a t e ri al h el d in t h e r e p o si to ry is m a d e fr e ely a v ail a bl e o nli n e a n d c a n b e r e a d , d o w nlo a d e d a n d c o pi e d fo r n o nc o m m e r ci al p riv a t e s t u dy o r r e s e a r c h p u r p o s e s . Pl e a s e c h e c k t h e m a n u s c ri p t fo r a n y fu r t h e r c o py ri g h t r e s t ri c tio n s. Fo r m o r e info r m a tio n, in cl u di n g o u r p olicy a n d s u b mi s sio n p r o c e d u r e , pl e a s e c o n t a c t t h e R e p o si to ry Te a m a t: u si r@ s alfo r d. a c. u k .Abstract. Agile software development methods are being used on larger projects thus the study of inter-team communication are becoming an important topic of interest for researchers. This research addresses inter-team communication by exploring the tools and three different boundaries, inter-team, team and customers, and geographically separated teams. In this research, we gathered data from semi-structured face-to-face interviews which were analyzed following the grounded theory approach. Our study reveals consensus from different teams on the importance of virtual Kanban boards. Also, some teams members tend to adapt to other teams' preferred communication tool. We observed challenges around interdependent user stories among the different teams and highlighted the problems that rise at the different boundaries. Keywords: agile information system development • inter-team communication • agile team boundary • communication • agile methods • cooperating agile teamsInter-team Boundaries. One of the main issues in inter-team communication occurs when members do not respond to requests from other teams. Members tend to prioritize the tasks given by their own team leader or scrum master, and postpone the tasks or requests given to them by other team's leaders. The Sales describes an incident that occurred with one of the developers under that context:"She started working at the customer but the screening wasn't completed yet and she needed to hand a document. I emailed her, called and she wasn't responding for several days and that was really frustrating. It took three days to complete that".Another issue that rises is how a team tends to assume that other teams know their status and if they are facing any setbacks. Developer-2 said: "Teams are ...

Inter-team communication in large-scale co-located software engineering: a case study

“…Most of the research on communication within software engineering is found within the context of large-scale development, in particular global software engineering (Herbsleb and Moitra 2001;Avritzer et al 2010;Stapel and Schneider 2014) and/or agile software development (Yagüe et al 2016;Bjørnson et al 2018;Rahy and Bass 2019;Nundlall and Nagowah 2020). Existing research within this field, to a large extent primarily focuses on coordination with the general aim of organising software development projects in a way that decreases the need of coordination especially between sites and distant teams, and thereby minimising the need for communication across distances while maximizing communication within teams (Avritzer et al 2010).…”

“…For co-located software engineering, the research related to communication is mainly within large-scale agile software development and on coordinating multiple selfgoverning teams (Paasivaara et al 2012;Bjørnson et al 2018) including knowledge networks (Šmite et al 2017), and softer aspects such as common values and norms (Nyfjord et al 2014;Paasivaara et al 2014). Research specifically on inter-team communication within software engineering is sparse with the exception of work on knowledge and information flow between teams (Santos et al 2015;Rahy and Bass 2019).…”

“…Rahy and Bass studied tools for inter-team communication within agile software development for a distributed SME context consisting of in total 65 employees working at 2 sites (Rahy and Bass 2019). In this case, a common virtual Kanban board was used to manage project work and progress.…”

“…There is a negative relationship between team size and the amount of inter-team contacts, which may explain the challenges of communicating in large-scale organisations (Bjørnson et al 2018). Team members tend to prioritize inter-team work tasks, which can lead to delays and rework when inter-team dependencies are affected (Rahy and Bass 2019).…”

“…Our case company is an example of such an organisation that faces challenges in retaining this informal and organic communication as their main coordination mechanism, as the company grows. While there is a host of research within software engineering on communication in general (Flemming 1978;Curtis et al 1988;Damian et al 2013;Stapel and Schneider 2014;Nundlall and Nagowah 2020), we are only aware of a few studies explicitly studying the communication between software engineering teams (Santos et al 2015;Rahy and Bass 2019). Since this is an important and challenging aspect for growing companies, such as our case company, we wanted to investigate inter-team communication in the context of large-scale development organisations.…”