Paper Info
Title
Slack me if you can!: using enterprise social networking tools in virtual agile teams
Abstract
Virtual teams rely on enterprise social networking tools such as Slack to collaborate efficiently. While such tools contribute to making the communication more synchronous and support distributed agile development, there are several challenges such as how to interact with each other and how to balance the communication with other types of communication mechanisms such as meetings, e-mail, and phone. In this paper, we describe and discuss how a distributed global project used Slack. Some of the challenges we identified were related to language problems, using too much direct messaging when communicating, and unbalanced activity (33% of the users accounted for 86% of the messages). The positive aspects of using the tool were increased transparency, team awareness, and informal communication. Further, Slack facilitates problem-focused communication which is essential for agile teams. Our study stresses the importance of reflecting on how virtual teams use communication tools, and we suggest that teams decide on guidelines on how to use the tools to improve their coordination.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICGSE.2019.00031
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Global Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
agile software development, communication, coordination, distributed teams, enterprise social media, enterprise social software, global teams, slack, team communication platforms
Transparency (graphic),Social network,Knowledge management,Agile software development,Enterprise social software,Phone,Language Problems,Engineering,Informal communication
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2329-6305
978-1-5386-9212-7
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Viktoria Gulliksen Stray14111.46
Nils Brede Moe267352.61
Mehdi Noroozi320.39