Communication in Agile Global Software Development: An Exploratory Study

Agile Global Software Development is gaining relevance and importance. While communication is key for exchanging information between team members, multi-site software development introduces additional obstacles and delays. This paper reports an exploratory study on the impact of infrastructure on communication. Although this topic has been a subject of interest many issues remain unaddressed. In this paper we address both team member communication and the combination of project and product development. One of the main conclusions is that communication can be improved if tool infrastructure combine different levels of information (i.e. team members, project status and product status). The use of simple tools, such as Vsee in SmartBoards is useful for reducing distance between sites. Dependency on bandwidth is not a new issue but is still relevant.