How Does Kanban Impact Communication and Collaboration in Software Engineering Teams?

TL;DR

This study investigates how Kanban influences communication and collaboration in software teams, showing initial positive effects on coordination and task visibility, which diminish as team rapport develops.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on Kanban's impact on team dynamics and highlights how its effects evolve over project phases.

Findings

Kanban initially enhances team coordination and communication.

Kanban helps surface missing tasks and synchronize work.

Effects on collaboration decrease as team rapport strengthens.

Abstract

Highly iterative development processes such as Kanban have gained significant importance in industry. However, the impact of such processes on team collaboration and communication is widely unknown. In this paper, we analyze how the Kanban process aids software team's behaviours -- in particular, communication and collaboration. The team under study developed a mobile payment software product in six iterations over seven weeks. The data were collected by a questionnaire, repeated at the end of each iteration. The results indicate that Kanban has a positive effect at the beginning to get the team working together to identify and coordinate the work. Later phases, when the team members have established good rapport among them, the importance for facilitating team collaboration could not be shown. Results also indicate that Kanban helps team members to collectively identify and surface the missing tasks to keep the pace of the development harmonized across the whole team, resulting into increased collaboration. Besides presenting the study and the results, the article gives an outlook on future work.