Many organizations are currently combining information technology outsourcing strategies with agile software development practices. The resulting agile global outsourced software development (AGOSD) projects involve joint virtual client vendor teams that apply agile development methods for delivering software, and are specifically challenging in terms of appropriate communication. Therefore, our study provides insights on this topic by evaluating agile communication practices for the usage within AGOSD projects. Our study (1) empirically identifies formerly unknown agile communication practices and (2) provides a practical relevance ranking of communication practices for the usage within AGOSD projects. With our results, we shed light on the as-of-yet under-researched topic of communication practices within AGOSD projects and therefore provide important knowledge for both theory and practice.

Software development is increasingly heading in the direction of combining agile software development practices and outsourcing software development to external vendors worldwide. The resulting agile global outsourced software development (AGOSD) projects are characterized by applying agile methods to distributed environments, which results in several problems for collaboration and coordination. Specifically, communication between the project participants has been found to be a major challenge in distributed environment. Therefore, our study investigates the problem of improving communication in distributed settings by identifying suitable communication practices for usage within AGOSD projects. Based on an extensive literature review, our study (1) provides an overview of adequate practices for usage in AGOSD and (2) points out differences to traditional communication practices of agile software development (ASD) projects used in collocated, non-distributed environments. research question guides our study: "How do communication practices for agile software development differ from communication practices for usage within agile global outsourced software development projects?"To answer our research question, we conducted a structured and comparative literature review on communication practices within ASD and AGOSD projects based on the guidelines of Webster and Watson [15] and Levy [16]. We analyzed the existing literature on both ASD and AGOSD projects and identified a total set of 42 communication practices for usage within both ASD and AGOSD. After identifying and analyzing the practices, we conducted