The Role of Social Agile Practices for Direct and Indirect Communication in Information Systems Development Teams

Abstract

Methods for Agile information systems development (ISD) are widely accepted in industry. One key difference in comparison to traditional, plan-driven ISD approaches is that Agile ISD teams rely heavily on direct, informal face-toface communication instead of indirect and formal documents, models, and plans. While the importance of communication in Agile ISD is generally acknowledged, empirical studies investigating this phenomenon are scarce. We empirically open up the "black box" of the Agile ISD process to enhance the knowledge about the communication mechanisms of Agile ISD teams. We conducted a case study at two medium-sized ISD companies. As our primary data collection technique, we carried out semi-structured interviews, which we complemented with observations and, in one case, a survey. Our study's main contribution is a set of so-called social Agile practices that positively impact the direct communication of team members. Our data suggests including the Agile practices co-located office space, daily stand-up meeting, iteration planning meeting, pair programming, sprint retrospective, and sprint review in this set. Furthermore, we investigate the role of more formal, indirect communication in Agile ISD projects. We highlight areas in which formal documents remain important so that a trade-off between indirect and direct communication is necessary.

The Impact of Modes, Styles, and Congruence of Control on Agile Teams: Insights from a Multiple Case Study

“…In a business environment where available technologies, market structures, and customer preferences change rapidly, ASD approaches have been shown to enable teams to react to emergent needs in a timely manner [5,42]. When teams decide to apply ASD methods, key agile practices and principles have to be considered [20,38,46]. Examples of agile practices from XP are pair programming (all production code is written with two programmers at one machine) or collective code ownership (anyone can change any code anywhere in the system at any time).…”

How Workspaces Influence Software Development? Preliminary Results of a Systematic Literature Review

“…Another factor related to the work environment is the localization where a project or the team perform their activities. Co-located teams refers to individuals who are geographically close to perform their activities and has the benefit of direct, efficient and face-to-face communication, in addition to close customer proximity [8]. A distributed team is characterized by teams or most individuals in a project who are working geographically dispersed [9].…”

“…Under this dimension, there are factors linked to already known and explored software engineering practices that can be easily found on literature. "On-site customer", for example, brings a customer representative to work with the project team physically [8].…”

"Mind the Gap": An Analysis of Communication in Agile Global Outsourced Software Development Projects

“…One central aspect that separates GOSD projects from AGOSD projects is the substantial role of regular, daily communication within the software development process [10,11,[24][25][26]. Hereby, communication includes both the communication within the software development team as well as the communication between the vendor team and the client [18].…”