Agile methodologies have been widely used in software development for more than a decade now. They have shown promising results to the persisting software crisis, defined as the inability to develop software on time, on budget, and within requirements. Many companies have adapted, tailored and customised the agile processes to fit their own organisational practices and culture. Simultaneously, in the increasingly globalised economy, distributed software development has emerged as a new trend, taking mainly advantage of access to world-class software professionals at lower costs. These two main trends relying on totally different philosophies hide many different opportunities and challenges on their own. Distributed software development is already burdened with different kinds of problems, such as different time zones and working hours across the globe, as well as cultural and linguistic barriers. Agile distributed methodologies bring further challenges regarding mainly communication, which is designed to be collocated and volatile requirements. There is little empirical knowledge on distributed agile software development in the literature. This paper aims to identify success factors and challenges for agile distributed software development. In particular, we investigate the challenges of communication in distributed agile software development and the use of social media as a communication and collaboration tool. We propose best practices in the application of distributed agile development based on an extensive literature review.
Lampropoulos, G., & Siakas, K. (2018). Communication in Distributed Agile Software Development: Impact of Social Media–Social Networking. In Proceedings of BCS Quality Specialist Group’s Annual International 26th Software Quality Management (SQM) Conference, 43–59. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327580426_Communication_in_Distributed_Agile_Software_Development_Impact_of_Social_Media_-_Social_Networking
Agile methodologies have been widely used in software development for more than a decade now. They have shown promising results to the persisting software crisis, defined as the inability to develop software on time, on budget, and within requirements. Many companies have adapted, tailored and customised the agile processes to fit their own organisational practices and culture. Simultaneously, in the increasingly globalised economy, distributed software development has emerged as a new trend, taking mainly advantage of access to world-class software professionals at lower costs. These two main trends relying on totally different philosophies hide many different opportunities and challenges on their own. Distributed software development is already burdened with different kinds of problems, such as different time zones and working hours across the globe, as well as cultural and linguistic barriers. Agile distributed methodologies bring further challenges regarding mainly communication, which is designed to be collocated and volatile requirements. There is little empirical knowledge on distributed agile software development in the literature. This paper aims to identify success factors and challenges for agile distributed software development. In particular, we investigate the challenges of communication in distributed agile software development and the use of social media as a communication and collaboration tool. We propose best practices in the application of distributed agile development based on an extensive literature review.
@inproceedings{lampropoulos_2019_communication,
title = {Communication in Distributed Agile Software Development: Impact of Social Media--Social Networking},
author = {Lampropoulos, Georgios and Siakas, Kerstin},
booktitle = {In proceedings of BCS Quality Specialist Group’s Annual International 26th Software Quality Management (SQM) conference},
pages = {43--59},
year = {2018},
country = {United Kingdom},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327580426_Communication_in_Distributed_Agile_Software_Development_Impact_of_Social_Media_-_Social_Networking}
}
