Making Meeting Success Measurable by Participants' Feedback

In software projects, a continuous exchange of information among team members is necessary to ensure a successful project. Meetings support this information exchange because they enable team members to share information simultaneously with all other team members. However, teams often get lost in endless discussions or developers do not gain a real benefit from a meeting. Consequently, participants are often frustrated by meetings. This leads to a negative mood and the project is endangered. To ensure the quality of information exchange and to prevent frustrated developers, meetings have to be assessed periodically. We ask the participants about their perception during a meeting because participants' satisfaction with the outcome is essential for project success. Hence, the definition of a good meeting bases on effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. In order to measure perceived meeting success, we developed a feedback method and a tool applying it. To validate the method, we conducted a case study during two meetings and compared our results to an objective analysis. During the case study, our feedback method showed the advantages over the compared behavior-based approach. Using our method, teams can easily gather feedback about their meeting and decide whether future meetings need an improvement or can be abandoned. So the method helps teams to find the right manner of communication in meetings and to reduce the developers' frustration.