Context: The daily stand-up meeting is one of the most used agile practices but has rarely been the subject of empirical research. Aim: The present study aims to identify how daily stand-up meetings are conducted and what the attitudes towards them are. Method: A grounded theory study of the daily stand-up meeting was conducted with twelve software teams in three companies in Malaysia, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom. We interviewed 60 people, observed 79 daily stand-up meetings and collected supplementary data. Results: The factors that contributed the most to a positive attitude towards the daily stand-up meeting were information sharing with the team and the opportunity to discuss and solve problems. The factors that contributed the most to a negative attitude were status reporting to the manager and spending too much time; both the frequency and duration of the meeting were perceived to be too much. Based on our results, we developed a grounded theory of daily stand-up meetings and proposed evidencebased guidelines on how to organize them. Conclusion: Organizations should be aware of the factors that may affect attitude towards daily stand-up meetings and should consider our proposed guidelines to improve the way the meetings are conducted.

Given the relevance of coordination in the field of global software engineering, this work was carried out to further understand coordination mechanisms. Specifically, we investigated meetings and the collaboration tool Slack. We conducted a longitudinal case study using a mixed-methods approach with surveys, observations, interviews, and chat logs. Our quantitative results show that employees in global projects spend 7 hours 45 minutes per week on average in scheduled meetings and 8 hours 54 minutes in unscheduled meetings. Furthermore, distributed teams were significantly larger than co-located teams, and people working in distributed teams spent somewhat more time in meetings per day. We found that low availability of key people, absence of organizational support for unscheduled meetings and unbalanced activity from team members in meetings and on Slack were barriers for effective coordination across sites. The positive aspects of using collaboration tools in distributed teams were increased team awareness and informal communication and reduced the need for e-mail. Our study emphasizes the importance of reflecting on how global software engineering teams use meetings and collaboration tools to coordinate. We provide practical advice for conducting better meetings and give suggestions for more efficient use of collaboration tools in global projects.

Virtual teams rely on enterprise social networking tools such as Slack to collaborate efficiently. While such tools contribute to making the communication more synchronous and to support distributed agile development, there are several challenges such as how to interact with each other and how to balance the communication with other types of communication mechanisms such as meetings, e-mail, and phone. In this paper, we describe and discuss how a distributed global project used Slack. Some of the challenges we identified were related to language problems, using too much direct messaging when communicating, and unbalanced activity (33% of the users accounted for 86% of the messages). The positive aspects of using the tool were increased transparency, team awareness, and informal communication. Further, Slack facilitates problem-focused communication which is important for agile teams. Our study stresses the importance of reflecting on how virtual teams use communication tools, and we suggest that teams decide on guidelines on how to use the tools to improve their coordination.