Online Appendix of the Paper "The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams"

GENERAL INFORMATION In our publication “The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams,” in the Journal of Systems and Software, we present an exploratory case study conducted in a large software organization, AFAS Software. Our study investigates the influence of the development paradigm and the formality of communication channels on written communication within hybrid development teams. Our main research question is: “How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the written communication content within hybrid software development teams?” To address the main research question, we operationalize communication content through a coding scheme comprising codes derived from the Project Management Life Cycle (PMLC), the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and speech acts types, which leads to the following sub-research questions: How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the content of written communication pertaining to the Project Management Life Cycle phases? (RQ1A & RQ1B) How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the content of written communication pertaining to the Software Development Life Cycle phases? (RQ2A & RQ2B) How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the use of speech acts types in written communication? (RQ3A & RQ3B) To answer these research questions, we test the following hypotheses regarding the PMLC, the SDLC, and speech acts types: The content of written communication within a development team H1: is affected by the development paradigm. H1.1: in formal communication channels is affected by the development paradigm. H1.2: in informal communication channels is affected by the development paradigm. The content of written communication within H2: a development team is affected by the formality of the communication channel. H2.1: a non-agile development team is affected by the formality of the communication channel. H2.2: an agile development team is affected by the formality of the communication channel. This online appendix contains supplementary material to uphold transparency and facilitate the reproduction of the statistical analysis. For more information, refer to the publication: Section 2.5 for the projects sampling Section 2.6 for data extraction and preparation Section