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Coordination Strategies When Working from Anywhere: A Case Study of Two Agile Teams

Abstract

Effective coordination is the key to successful agile teams. They rely on frequent interactions and mutual adjustment to manage dependencies between activities, which traditionally has been solved by co-locating the team. As the world is adjusting to post-covid work-life, companies are moving towards a work-from-anywhere approach where workers can choose to what degree they want to work from home or office. However, little is known about coordination in such a context. We report findings on developers’ emerging strategies when working-from-anywhere, from an exploratory case study in Norway, including eight interviews. Our study shows that new strategies for mutual adjustment emerged as teams experimented with different tools and approaches: developers chose tasks according to location, tasks with vague requirements are performed collocated while individual tasks requiring focus are best performed at home; large meetings are virtual, preserving co-located time for collaborative tasks; using virtual rooms to maintain unscheduled meetings as they communicate mental presence to teammates, lowering the threshold for intra-team unscheduled talks. The strategies can help organizations create a productive and effective environment for developers.
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Category

Academic chapter

Language

English

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Software Engineering, Safety and Security

Year

2022

Publisher

Springer

Book

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming: 23rd International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2022, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 13–17, 2022, Proceedings

ISBN

9783031081682

Page(s)

52 - 61

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository