DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13894086
title: Online Appendix of the Paper "The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams"

description: GENERAL INFORMATION

In our publication “The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams,” in the Journal of Systems and Software, 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. Our main research question is: “How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the written communication content within hybrid software development teams?” To address the main research question, we operationalize communication content through a coding scheme comprising codes derived from the Project Management Life Cycle (PMLC), the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and speech acts types, which leads to the following sub-research questions:



How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the content of written communication pertaining to the Project Management Life Cycle phases? (RQ1A & RQ1B)

How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the content of written communication pertaining to the Software Development Life Cycle phases? (RQ2A & RQ2B)

How do the employed development paradigm and the formality of the communication channel impact the use of speech acts types in written communication? (RQ3A & RQ3B)


To answer these research questions, we test the following hypotheses regarding the PMLC, the SDLC, and speech acts types:

 

The content of written communication within a development team





H1: is affected by the development paradigm.



H1.1: in formal communication channels is affected by the development paradigm.

H1.2: in informal communication channels is affected by the development paradigm.





The content of written communication within





H2: a development team is affected by the formality of the communication channel.



H2.1: a non-agile development team is affected by the formality of the communication channel.

H2.2: an agile development team is affected by the formality of the communication channel.





This online appendix contains supplementary material to uphold transparency and facilitate the reproduction of the statistical analysis. For more information, refer to the publication:



Section 2.5 for the projects sampling

Section 2.6 for data extraction and preparation

Section 2.7 for the coding scheme and data analysis


Software Dependencies: 



PDF Viewer (e.g. Acrobat Reader)

IBM SPSS

Microsoft Excel

Python


FILES OVERVIEW

JSS Online Appendix

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.


DATA ACCESS AND SHARING

Recommended citation for this dataset: Ly, D., Overeem, M., Brinkkemper, S., Dalpiaz, F., 2024. Online Appendix of the Paper “The Power of Words in Agile vs. Waterfall Development: Written Communication in Hybrid Software Teams”. [Data set]. In The Journal of Systems and Software. Zenodo. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.13894086.

 

License information: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International