The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams

Software development is constantly evolving, adapting to emerging technologies and development paradigms while leveraging advancements in communication technologies and work modes. We conduct an exploratory case study in a large software organization to investigate how the development paradigm and the formality of communication channels affect written communication within hybrid teams. We perform statistical and content analysis of written conversations from 20 projects involving two software products that use industry adaptations of the Waterfall model and of Scrum, respectively. We found that in agile-developed projects, communication related to the execution-monitoring-control phase of the Project Management Life Cycle is more prevalent, and communication related to the initiation phase occurs more frequently in informal channels. For both project types, communication primarily pertains to the software construction phase of the Software Development Life Cycle. After annotating communication contents using speech acts, representatives are found to be prevalent in informal channels for agile-developed projects, directives are more prevalent in informal channels for waterfall-developed projects, and expressives are more frequent in informal channels for both project types. We provide empirical evidence that development paradigms and communication channel formality impact written communication, with agile-developed projects showing more collaborative interactions in informal channels compared to waterfall-developed projects. Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board. •We analyze the written communication of 20 projects in the software industry.•We compare the projects in terms of development paradigm and channel formality.•We applied statistical and content analyses to the communication contents.•We find that development paradigm and channel formality impact written communication.