SOCIAL INTERACTION PROMOTION IN DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN AGILE PROJECTS

Companies are increasingly combining agile methodologies and distributed software development relying on people and their creativity, flexible team self-organization with incentives for participation, social cooperation and less formalization to build software products. We investigate communication and social interactions in distributed agile software development settings, using an interpretative approach to interview 35 project professionals. We analyze how senior project managers perceive communication and how professionals who adopt agile software development methodologies understand how aspects of social interaction influence projects with distributed teams. We add to the literature a model for the promotion of social interactions in distributed agile projects. We introduced the interaction coordination variable that emerged from the field aiming to encourage and direct relationships between team members so that they are aligned with the mutual benefits of the project. These benefits include improving communication, knowledge sharing, and the sense of responsibility for the product. The study also draws attention of practitioners to the promotion of social interactions in agile DSD environments. The proposed model contributes to practitioners regardless of the size of the organization where they work. Practitioners can analyze the role of social ties, coordination, communication and trust to the promotion of social interactions based on the views of their peers