How does Kanban impact communication and collaboration in software engineering teams?

Abstract

Highly iterative development processes such as Kanban have gained significant importance in industry. However, the impact of such processes on team collaboration and communication is widely unknown. In this paper, we analyze how the Kanban process aids software team's behaviors - in particular, communication and collaboration. The team under study developed a mobile payment software product in six iterations over seven weeks. The data were collected by a questionnaire, repeated at the end of each iteration. The results indicate that Kanban has a positive effect at the beginning to get the team working together to identify and coordinate the work. Later phases, when the team members have established good rapport among them, the importance for facilitating team collaboration could not be shown. Results also indicate that Kanban helps team members to collectively identify and surface the missing tasks to keep the pace of the development harmonized across the whole team, resulting into increased collaboration. Besides presenting the study and the results, the article gives an outlook on future work.