Co-ordination Support for Managing Progress of Distributed Agile Projects

Progress in agile development is determined by the amount of 'working software' produced. Source code versioning, unit testing, continuous integration and acceptance testing (AT) are technical factors that affect the maturity of the software artefects produced. Therefore, development progress is subject to change due to impact of these technical factors (e.g. modifying source code artefects may affect completed user stories). In co-located agile projects, face-to-face interaction is used to share information about changes that may affect development progress. However, in distributed projects, team members find it harder to maintain an awareness of these changes, which affects their understanding of the development progress. This causes them to rely on less accurate progress information and contributes in producing low quality code and unnecessary rework and delays. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach that supports management of the development progress in geographically distributed agile projects by identifying and co-ordinating the impact of the technical factors on progress, which will provide distributed agile teams with improved awareness of the actual progress of the software.