Communication Challenges in Distributed Student Projects

Distributed software development has become more common in recent years when the possibilities for working over distances have improved and many developers have been forced to work from home due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Teams and team members in distributed environments face challenges due to distance factors that separate collaborators from each other. Communication has been considered the most common challenge in such environments. Instead of face-to-face communication, collaborators must rely on communication tools to communicate with each other over distances, which can naturally cause difficulties. Various solutions have been suggested for different challenges. For instance, the use of agile practices has been proven to improve communication. Communication challenges can negatively affect project success if left unsolved, which makes it important for practitioners to understand communication challenges and strategies to mitigate and solve them. However, new research is needed for identifying all the possible challenges and their solutions. This study investigated communication in software development projects that involved university students who had to collaborate in a distributed environment with limited face-to-face communication possibilities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main objective of this study was to identify communication-related challenges that hindered communication between the participants. Secondly, this study identified how the teams managed to overcome the challenges, and whether the agile practices utilized by the teams helped solve the challenges. For this purpose, a case study was conducted. Teams of students that participated in a software project work course at Tampere University, during the 2020 fall semester, provided the data for the study in the form of documentation, questionnaires, and interviews. The data were analyzed, which resulted in a list of communication challenges and their solutions. Many communication challenges and solutions were identified. Communication was not the most significant challenge for the student teams that participated in the study. For this reason, most of the teams had no major difficulties with communication. However, the practices that were used would have most likely caused more significant problems in real-world projects. Further research could be able to identify different types of challenges and their solutions from similar projects