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Planned and unplanned meetings in large-scale projects

Published: 21 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

To succeed with large-scale projects, teams need to coordinate ideas and efforts, which is a core purpose of meetings. We conducted a case study in a large software company where we observed meetings and surveyed 65 members working in large-scale agile projects in Poland, Norway and China. Our results show that employees in the large-scale projects spend, on average, a total of 13.5 hours per week in meetings. The employees spend somewhat more time in ad hoc conversations and unscheduled meetings than they do in scheduled meetings. The majority work in distributed teams, and the size of distributed teams is significantly larger than that of co-located teams. Successful meetings in large-scale projects are critical. We propose a theory of coordination by feedback, which can be used as a basis for future research on meetings in agile software development.

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  • (2024)Characterizing Software Maintenance Meetings: Information Shared, Discussion Outcomes, and Information CapturedProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623330(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2024)On meetings involving remote software teamsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107541175:COnline publication date: 18-Nov-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
XP '18: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Agile Software Development: Companion
May 2018
111 pages
ISBN:9781450364225
DOI:10.1145/3234152
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. ad-hoc conversations
  2. agile projects
  3. coordination effectiveness
  4. coordination practices
  5. large-scale software development
  6. scheduled meetings
  7. team performance
  8. unscheduled meetings

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XP '18 Companion

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Overall Acceptance Rate 11 of 15 submissions, 73%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Understanding the Career Mobility of Blind and Low Vision Software ProfessionalsProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3641822.3641872(170-181)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Characterizing Software Maintenance Meetings: Information Shared, Discussion Outcomes, and Information CapturedProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623330(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2024)On meetings involving remote software teamsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107541175:COnline publication date: 18-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Unplanned meetings: Shifting school principal practice 5 min at a timeEducational Management Administration & Leadership10.1177/17411432231186531Online publication date: 6-Jul-2023
  • (2022)A longitudinal explanatory case study of coordination in a very large development programme: the impact of transitioning from a first- to a second-generation large-scale agile development methodEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-022-10230-628:1Online publication date: 8-Nov-2022
  • (2020)Understanding coordination in global software engineering: A mixed-methods study on the use of meetings and SlackJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2020.110717(110717)Online publication date: Jul-2020
  • (2018)Towards an understanding of scaling frameworks and business agilityProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Agile Software Development: Companion10.1145/3234152.3234176(1-4)Online publication date: 21-May-2018

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