Coordination in Distributed Agile Software Development: insights from a COTS-based Case Study

Date
2019-12-12
Authors
Buchan, J
Talukder, ABMN
Senapathi, M
Supervisor
Item type
Conference Contribution
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract

This study investigates the practices of a development team that uses an Agile system of workingwhere some team members and stakeholders were distributed geographically and temporally. The focus of the investigation was to study the dependencies and related coordination activities as the team collaborated on their work, which was the installation and customization of a complex Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software system in this case. We collected data by interviewing eight key team members and observing three team meetings over a 2-month period. We made detailed field notes and used thematic analysis to identify the key globally distributed dependencies in the development process. We identify and discuss the coordination mechanisms and tools that address these dependencies, along with the main coordination challenges. We conclude by discussing some ideas and lessons learned by the participants which we expect to be useful for other teams in a similar context.

Description
Keywords
Source
DOI
Rights statement
© 2019 Buchan, Talukder & Senapathi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia License, which permits noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and ACIS are credited.