The Impact of Media Selection on Stakeholder Communication in Agile Global Software Development: A Preliminary Industrial Case Study

This paper investigates the selection of appropriate communication media in agile global software development. Frequent communication between project stakeholders is core to agile software development. Furthermore the choice of media is fundamental to effective communication. In a global software development environment the challenges that distance creates must be addressed in the choice of media. The wrong media for the wrong task can cause many problems. We apply Media Synchronicity Theory to the selection of communication media in a global software company which uses Scrum. Our results show that the theory is helpful in highlighting the important factors in choosing an appropriate media for 'conveying' and 'converging' communications. However the theory does not cover all important factors. We confirm previous findings that media availability, media familiarity and infrastructure capabilities also need to be taken into consideration.