A framework to study requirements-driven collaboration among agile teams: Findings from two case studies

Stakeholders' collaboration is required to develop requirements in agile software development. Requirements engineering and agile methods share common grounds as they both focus on stakeholder collaboration. The key issue is finding a way to study collaboration driven by requirements in geographically distributed agile teams. In this paper, we aim to propose a framework to study collaboration driven by requirements among agile teams and determine the impact of their collaboration patterns on the iteration performance. We define collaboration in terms of communication as information exchange among members, and awareness knowledge of others. Two case studies were conducted to examine communication and awareness network patterns among distributed agile teams. Data were collected through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and onsite observation. The findings revealed that the framework aids in determining the core members, collaboration trends, clustering tendency, communication and awareness reciprocity of the teams, small worldliness and centralisation behaviour of the networks and iteration performance of the agile teams. The framework has implications for the industrial practitioners, i.e. managers to learn about their team's collaboration in order to take measures for performance improvement. At the same time, the researchers can use this framework to study other social aspects in variable settings to produce more empirical results.