Enhancing the Effective Communication in Distributed Agile
Environment Arushi Walia · 2015
Agility has become today's buzzword when describing a modern software development process. Organizations combine agile approach and Distributed Software Development (DSD) in order to reap the benefits of both agile and distributed development such as to develop better quality software solutions in lesser time and cost. Agile approaches highly values communication between team members and customer collaboration to improve software development processes, even though, communication in globally distributed agile teams can be difficult. No doubt, a number of tools and services exist but these do not support the effective communication among team members which is vital for knowledge sharing in distributed agile environment for better project planning. Besides, using these tools requires proper training sessions by the team members and customers to keep them up with pace and thus proves to be costly for small and medium sized organizations. Moreover, inadequate customer involvement causes adverse effects on the success rate of distributed agile projects. In order to address these, Another Project Progress Tracking System (APPTS) is developed. As a main characteristic, it plans and organizes the software project as a series of iterations that are guided by customer's exact requirements through adequate customer involvement and effective communication among team members. The developed approach is implemented on two distributed agile software development companies which have been adversely impacted due to lack of communication and inadequate customer collaboration. The results provides distributed agile teams with an improved awareness of the actual progress and thus increases the success rate of projects by 20-35% resulting in more satisfied customers.