Meeting intensity as an indicator for project pressure: Exploring meeting profiles

Meetings are hot spots of communication and collaboration in software development teams. Both distributed and co-located teams need to meet for coordination, communication, and collaboration. It is difficult to assess the quality of these three crucial aspects, or the social effectiveness and impact of a meeting: Personalities, psychological and professional aspects interact. It is, therefore, challenging to identify emerging communication problems or to improve collaboration by studying a wealth of interrelated details of project meetings. However, it is relatively easy to count meetings, and to measure when and how long they took place. This is objective information, does not violate privacy of participants, and the data might even be retrieved from project calendars automatically. In an exploratory study, we observed 14 student teams working on comparable four-month projects. Among many other aspects, we counted and measured meetings. In this contribution, we compare the meeting profiles qualitatively, and derive a number of hypotheses relevant for software projects.