Information flows at inter-team boundaries in agile information systems development

Abstract

Agile software development methods are being used on larger projects thus the study of inter-team communication are becoming an important topic of interest for researchers. This research addresses inter-team communication by exploring the tools and three different boundaries, inter-team, team and customers, and geographically separated teams. In this research, we gathered data from semi-structured face-to-face interviews which were analyzed following the grounded theory approach. Our study reveals consensus from different teams on the importance of virtual Kanban boards. Also, some team members tend to adapt to other teams’ preferred communication tool. We observed challenges around interdependent user stories among the different teams and highlighted the problems that rise at the different boundaries.