How Project-management-tools are used in Agile Practice: Benefits, Drawbacks and Potentials

The use of agile methodologies is quite common in distributed software development. To facilitate sharing of project relevant information across distributed agile teams, project-management-tools (e.g. Jira, Youtrack) are commonly used. Literature and practice show drawbacks in teamwork and communication when those mainly browser-based tools are used instead of traditional paper-based media. Improvements in this area are possible if we acquire knowledge of how these tools are used in practice and what problems or challenges need to be addressed in the future. Therefore we conducted an exploratory semi-structured interview study investigating in what manner common project-management-tools are used in the particular phases and meetings of an agile development process. We have interviewed five experienced agile coaches that guided projects with different constellations regarding the number of involved agile teams and their locations. As a first result we summarized and structured our findings according to all steps of an agile process in the form of textual descriptions and diagrams. Thereby we focused on the combined usage of digitial project-management-tools and traditional paper-based media. As a second outcome we listed benefits, drawbacks and potential improvements of digital project-management-tools in agile software development from the interviewees' points of view.