Communication in Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study

Distributed software development is an increasingly important development approach for software companies as it brings tempting opportunities. Distributed development is already burdened with several problems and agile methods bring further challenges in the form of their reliance on verbal communication and volatile requirements. There is little empirical knowledge on distributed agile software development. We conducted two distributed agile software development case studies and compared our findings against existing recommendations about communication in distributed agile development. Our findings along with existing literature conclude that presented recommendations are worthwhile considering in distributed agile development, but with some caution. Our empirically based findings indicate that the role of a well-defined customer is the key recommendation. The lack of a well-defined customer able to meet responsibilities, as well as volatile requirements and inefficient communication, can cause severe problems even in small-scale distributed agile software development projects. Discussed recommendations are complemented with an additional recommendation.