DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11238030
title: Online Appendix of the Paper "The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams"

description: In our submission to the Journal of Software and Systems, titled “The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams,” 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. 

JSS Online Appendix

This online appendix contains supplementary material to uphold transparency and facilitate the reproduction of the statistical analysis. Please refer to Section 2.1 for the research questions and hypotheses.

The root folder includes the “Project Teams Composition.pdf” file, which contains the anonymized compositions of 20 project teams: 11 agile (PrAG) projects and 9 waterfall (PrWF) projects. This file lists the project team members involved in communication within the Microsoft Teams and Insite channels. 

Subfolder "SPSS Files"

This subfolder includes the SPSS files, which contain the normality test and Mann-Whitney U Tests. 



Normality Test.spv: This file contains the results of the normality test.


We performed the normality test. In most cases, the significance of Shapiro-Wilk is below 0.05; thus, the data is not normally distributed and fails to meet the assumption for the t-test. We, therefore, opted for the Mann-Whitney U test, the non-parametric alternative of the t-test.

The files below contain the results of Mann-Whitney U Tests, which are presented in Appendix A - Tables A.7 (a), A.8 (a), A.9 (a):



H1 - PrAG vs PrWF Product.spv: This file contains the results for hypothesis 1. 

H1.1 - PrAG vs PrWF Formal.spv: This file contains the results for hypothesis 1.1.

H1.2 - PrAG vs PrWF Informal.spv: This file contains the results for hypothesis 1.2.


The files below contain the results of Mann-Whitney U Tests, which are presented in Appendix A - Tables A.7 (b), A.8 (b), A.9 (b):



H2 - PrAG vs PrWF Formality.spv: This file contains the results for hypothesis 2.

H2.1 - PrWF Formal vs Informal.spv: This file contains the results for hypothesis 2.1.

H2.2 - PrAG Formal vs Informal.spv: This file contains the results for hypothesis 2.2.


Subfolder "Excel Files"









This subfolder includes the necessary files to perform calculations, and the results of these calculations.







JSS Paper.xlsx: This file contains the absolute numbers, which are used as input for the calculations.

JSS-Statistics.py: This Python script uses the “JSS Paper.xlsx” file to perform calculations based on the hypotheses for Project Life Cycle Management (PMLC), Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and Speech Acts.


The files below contain the results of the calculations:



PMLC (RQ1A & RQ1B)_v1.xlsx: This file contains the results for the PMLC phases. The results are presented in Appendix A.1.

SDLC (RQ2A & RQ2B)_v1.xlsx: This file contains the results for the SDLC phases. The results are presented in Appendix A.2.

Speech Acts (RQ3A & RQ3B)_v1.xlsx: This file contains the results for the speech act types. The results are presented in Appendix A.3.