Communication and Awareness Patterns of Distributed Agile Teams

Abstract

Agile methods emphasize on team's collaboration and so does the requirements engineering process. But how do agile teams collaborate with their geographically distributed counter parts to accomplish requirements related activities? Although, proved to be flexible and dynamic it needs to conduct more empirical investigation to identify the collaboration patterns of distributed agile teams. Therefore, in this chapter collaboration patterns of geographically distributed agile teams are identified in terms of reported communication (defined as information exchange) among team members and their awareness (defined as knowledge about each other) of each other. A multiple case study method is used in this chapter to study the geographically distributed agile teams in four IT organizations. Though, some of the findings revealed several patterns are corroborating the previous results available in literature. However, some of the patterns identified in this chapter are specific to distributed agile teams. For instance, the chapter identifies that high awareness among agile teams leads to more communication. Implications for research and software industry are discussed and future research directions are also provided.