Can Agile Software Tools Bring the Benefits of a Task Board to Globally Distributed Teams?

Abstract

Software-based tooling has become an essential part of globally disitrbuted software development. In this study we focus on the usage of such tools and task boards in particular. We investigate the deployment of these tools through a field research in 4 different companies that feature agile and globally distributed development teams. We interviewed a total of 15 developers and concluded that the paper-based task board currently still has many advantages when compared to its software-based solution. Our findings indicate that the majority of the investigated companies that use the agile method Scrum also work with a software tool to support Scrum. While distributed teams use a software only approach, a large portion of collocated teams we studied utilize a combination of a paper based task board and the archiving and integration properties of the software solution. We reflect on these findings through the lens of media synchronicity theory and conclude that this theory is useful for explaining the current use and future development of software tools to support agile globally distributed development teams.