Teaching and learning agile collaboration

An exploratory study in communication in Agile Global Software Development

“…The suggestions proposed by Sinha [64] concerning the fact that developers should be able to initiate conversations easily and that oneto-many communication tools could support this ability have been addressed for the case of distributed teams and also pointed out by Mishra et al [20]. This is also aligned with Paasivaara [65] regarding the importance of creating a community, and Kropp et al [11] regarding placing the team in the same room as a way of fostering communication. However, these conclusions are not fully in agreement with the finding of Niinimaki et al [22] with respect to the preference that technical personnel may have for using text-based…”

“…In addition, Kropp et al [11 ] recently confirmed that decorated tools alone did not enhance communication, as the quality of the communication during meetings depended on the person speaking and the message conveyed. Looking for alternative proposals to those that address communication mainly from a media perspective, Kááriáinen [31] addressed communication by focusing on centralized infrastructures, finding that these were useful in AGSD frameworks for sharing information, which facilitates team communication.…”

“…The infrastructure provided in this research proved to be a good starting point to help créate a common ground [11] where team members could communicate fluently in global distributed environments, improving communication, and allowing them to benefit from team members sharing information. Within the research reported here, the common ground was technically supported by a set of tools consisting, briefly, of a smartboard with Vsee and a central repository with tools to exploit information.…”

“…The feeling in most of the meetings was similar, except for the sprint planning meetings, as shown in Table 8. [11], who introduced the concept of "common ground". The suggestions proposed by Sinha [64] concerning the fact that developers should be able to initiate conversations easily and that oneto-many communication tools could support this ability have been addressed for the case of distributed teams and also pointed out by Mishra et al [20].…”

“…In this research work, however, observations were obtained from three perspectives: communication among team members, communication of the status of the development process, and communication of the status of the progress of the product under development, in accordance with Usman's [10] recommendation. It has been possible to show that, to overeóme some of the obstacles to communication in order to créate a common ground (a concept deeply studied in [11]), it is advantageous to combine media tools (e.g. a continuously operating smartboard that displays the workplace while the team is working) with tools that allow distributed teams to share information about the status of the project during the development process; further, the discussions of the development process must always be evidence-based and data driven.…”