Media Supported Workspaces in Agile Software Development: Doctoral Symposium Paper

The use of software tools has become a common practice in global software engineering to handle requirements and to exchange project status amongst distributed teams and stakeholders. In context of agile software development the replacement of paper-based media (e.g. Task Board) with software tools results in heavily decreased collaboration and transparency within agile teams. Since the number of agile projects in global context increases, it is necessary to find an adequate solution to share project status without influencing the underlying agile process in a negative way. The proposed research project investigates why the replacement of paper-based media has such strong influence on group work in agile teams. Thereby, the focus of research is on the agile Task Board as the most important example for paper-based media of agile workspaces. With help of these findings we will develop a conceptual and technical solution, based on optical tracking of a paper-based Task Board, to share project status amongst stakeholders. The paper introduces the current state of the art, corresponding research questions, the entire research methods and current progress of our research.