Studying relevant socio-technical aspects of requirements-driven collaboration in agile teams

Requirements engineering requires intensive collaboration among team members. Agile methods also require constant collaboration among those involved in the project. While working on certain interdependent tasks, team members develop social and technical relationships that instigate socio-technical dependencies. The main goal of our research is to investigate socio-technical aspects that underlie requirements-driven collaboration among agile teams and their influence on project performance. In this paper we present our research approach to achieve such goal and briefly report on preliminary findings. A survey revealed that communication and awareness are the most relevant socio-technical aspects that underlie requirements-driven collaboration in agile teams. Initial findings of a case study aiming to identify requirements-driven collaboration patterns suggest that teams well aware of each other have lesser communication gaps and require lesser rework. Findings will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between collaboration and performance in agile teams.