Team Meetings and Their Relevance for the Software Development Process Over Time

Information sharing in teams is one of the most important aspects of successful software development. For instance, requirements, design decisions and guidelines need to be communicated with the whole team or with specific team members. For information exchange, communication is mandatory. Meetings are an effective way to communicate with many team members. Hence, much information can be shared during team meetings. But meeting and communication behavior may vary. During the project, the team members get to know the others more and more. This has an influence on the chosen ways of information sharing and hence changes communication behavior.We are interested in analyzing the influence of meetings on team-internal communication and collaboration. To analyze collaboration, we consider a measure of indirections representing used communication channels and the perceived communication intensity between each of the team members. In a study with 65 students across eight development teams, we examine how intensively team members used various communication channels and if there is a change in communication and meeting behavior over time.In our study, the communication behavior becomes increasingly effective during the development process and the number of team meetings decreases in the course of the project. Moreover, the teams decentralize their communication behavior during project progress. According to our results, there is no cause for concern if there are less or shorter meetings at the end than at the beginning of a project.