The Critical Communication Challenges Between Geographically Distributed Agile Development Teams: Empirical Findings

Background: Although a number of empirical studies have investigated communication challenges during recent years, we still need to discover the most critical challenges that face communication when agile development is geographically distributed. We also need to discover how successful geographically distributed agile development (GDAD) organizations deal with these challenges. Literature review: Most previous studies reported that the critical challenges facing GDAD communication can be categorized into five themes: differences in cultures, different time zones, different spoken languages, different personal skills, and the efficiency and effectiveness of communication tools used. Research questions: 1. What are the challenges of communication between GDAD teams? 2. How can the impact of GDAD communication challenges be mitigated? Methodology: Data were collected by interviewing 12 members of a three-team organization using distributed agile development. These teams are distributed over three countries; the main team located in Australia, the developers' team located in China, and the testers' team located in India. A thematic analysis technique was used to identify communication challenges and practices used to mitigate the effect of these challenges. Results: Our findings reveal that the five challenges are still critical to GDAD. Moreover, we report a new critical challenge of communication in GDAD, the insufficient documentation provided by distributed teams and members. In addition, we recommend several practices to mitigate the impact of these challenges. Conclusions: Communication among distributed agile development teams still faces several critical challenges, and the solutions to these challenges provided in recent years have not been sufficient. This fact prompts the need for more research on how the impact of these challenges can be lessened.