On meetings involving remote software teams: A systematic literature review

Context:

The adoption of remote work models and the global nature of software projects have significantly transformed collaboration and communication within the software development industry. Remote meetings have become a common means of collaboration for software development teams.

Objective:

This study seeks to enhance our understanding of remote meeting practices in software teams. It identifies the benefits of remote meetings, the problems associated with remote meetings, tools used to facilitate remote meetings and provides recommended good practices. The study employs a systematic literature review to assist remote teams in improving their meeting practices and identifying areas for future research.

Methods:

We conducted a systematic literature review that involved searching multiple databases and employing quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques on the identified set of studies to answer our research questions.

Results:

The search yielded 30 papers offering valuable insights into remote meeting practices in software teams. Remote meetings offer advantages over traditional in-person meetings such as increased effectiveness and ease of attendance. However, challenges exist such as technological issues, ineffective collaboration, and reduced team socialization. Identified good practices to mitigate the challenges include inserting breaks in longer meetings, catch-up time at the start of meeting, communicating goals in advance of the meeting, and pre-recording demos.

Conclusion:

The study explored remote meetings in software teams. We identified advantages that remote meetings have in comparison to in-person meetings, challenges to remote meetings, and good practices along with supportive tooling. While the practices help in promoting effective meetings, additional research is required to further improve remote meeting experiences. Researching topics such as investigating different types of meetings common to software development teams along with the potential for novel tools to better support meetings will help identify additional practices and tools that can benefit remote teams.