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Agile development methods emerged during the late 1990s and early 2000s as a response to the industry’s need for faster and more lightweight development approaches. Agile development is an approach to development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their end users (Nagel, 2015; Nikabadi & Hakaki, 2018; Omamo, Rodrigues, & Muliaro, 2020; Papke-Shields & Boyer-Wright, 2017; Parast, 2011). It uses small iterative work sequences that are commonly known as Sprints. Within a Sprint, a scheduled number of tasks or a part of the project has to be completed by the team and made ready for review. The main roles of the Agile framework are the product manager, the project manager, and the team. The continuous and effective communication between these roles is essential for the successful completion of the assigned tasks. One of the essential aspects of Agile development methods is the emphasis on the informal communication that is conducted, preferably face-to-face (Todorović, Petrović, Mihić, Obradović, & Bushuyev, 2015; Usman Tariq, 2013; Von Thiele Schwarz, 2017; Winter, Andersen, Elvin, & Levene, 2006a). Informal communication has been defined as personal, peer-oriented, and interactive communication, and it allows correcting mistakes and filling in the required details quickly (Hoon Kwak, & Dixon, 2008; J. W., 2018; Labedz & Gray, 2013; Lee, Lapira, Bagheri, & Kao, 2013). Additionally, physical proximity is essential for participants to engage in informal communication, which is highly emphasized in Agile literature (Galli & Battiloro, 2019; Haddad & Otayek, 2019; Aslani, Akbari, & Tabasi, 2018; Azar, 2012). An Agile development team should be located in a shared workspace, and the customer should be on-site to provide input and feedback (Galli, 2018b; Galli, 2018c; Gholizad, Ahmadi, Hassannayebi, Memarpour, & Shakibayifar, 2017). So, communication management plays a major role in the Agile methodology.
On the other hand, Agile approaches are currently used in globally distributed environments those cross-significant distances over time and space. This, in turn, makes physical and temporal (the proximity between the participants) approaches difficult to achieve, which creates challenges for informal face-to-face communications (Easton & Rosenzweig, 2012; Mohamed & Hassan, 2019; Parker, Parsons, & Isharyanto, 2015; Schwedes, Riedel, & Dziekan, 2017; Shanbhag & Pardede, 2019). Effective communication is essential in globally distributed development regardless of the development approach (Al-Kadeem, Backar, Eldardiry, & Haddad, 2017a). According to the study by Aikhuele & Turan (2018), 74% of the problems of distributed development were related to communication. They found that the lack of communication or the poor quality of it was often the root cause of other problems identified in the study (Marcelino-Sádaba, Pérez-Ezcurdia, Lazcano, & Villanueva, 2014; Galli, 2018d; Galli, 2019a; Shenhar & Levy, 2007; Sutherland, 2004).