Negotiating Common Ground in Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study Perspective

Distributed Agile Development is gaining prevalence in the global software engineering field. However establishing and negotiating common ground across geographical, temporal and cultural borders can be a challenging process for distributed team members. This paper reports on early findings of one case study and investigates how common ground or mutually shared understanding takes place within one globally distributed agile team. The paper presents an extended version of the 3C Collaboration model, drawing upon existing literature of raising awareness cues through the use of boundary objects. The research seeks a greater understanding of how common ground is negotiated across boundaries. The case study data was obtained from semi-structured interviews within a financial context. The findings suggest that team members use multifaceted techniques to enhance common ground for better collaborative practices to take place.