Beyond words and actions: Exploring Multimodal Analytics and Collaboration in the Digital Age

TL;DR

This paper investigates how multimodal analytics can assess communication in agile software teams, revealing that planning poker promotes equitable participation without increasing overall speaking or attention time.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of multimodal analytics to evaluate communication dynamics in software development, highlighting planning poker's role in fostering equitable team participation.

Findings

Planning poker leads to more equitable speaking time distribution.

Total speaking and attention times are not significantly affected.

Multimodal analytics can uncover new insights into team communication.

Abstract

This article explores Multimodal Analytics' use in assessing communication within agile software development, particularly through planning poker, to understand collaborative behavior. Multimodal Analytics examines verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal communication, crucial for effective collaboration in software engineering, which demands efficient communication, cooperation, and coordination. The study focuses on how planning poker influences speaking time and attention among team members by utilizing advanced audiovisual data analysis technologies. Results indicate that while planning poker doesn't significantly change total speaking or attention time, it leads to a more equitable speaking time distribution, highlighting its benefit in enhancing equitable team participation. These findings emphasize planning poker's role in improving software team collaboration and suggest multimodal analytics' potential to explore new aspects of team communication. This research contributes to better understanding coordination techniques' impact in software development and team education, proposing future investigations into optimizing team collaboration and performance through alternative coordination techniques and multimodal analysis across different collaborative settings.