Coordination Strategies When Working from Anywhere: A Case Study of Two Agile Teams

Abstract: Effective coordination is the key to successful agile teams. They rely on frequent interactions and mutual adjustment to manage dependencies between activities, which traditionally has been solved by co-locating the team. As the world is adjusting to post-covid work-life, companies are moving towards a work-from-anywhere approach where workers can choose to what degree they want to work from home or office. However, little is known about coordination in such a context. We report findings on developers' emerging strategies when working-from-anywhere, from an exploratory case study in Norway, including eight interviews. Our study shows that new strategies for mutual adjustment emerged as teams experimented with different tools and approaches: developers chose tasks according to location, tasks with vague requirements are performed collocated while individual tasks requiring focus are best performed at home; large meetings are virtual, preserving co-located time for collaborative tasks; using virtual rooms to maintain unscheduled meetings as they communicate mental presence to teammates, lowering the threshold for intra-team unscheduled talks. The strategies can help organizations create a productive and effective environment for developers.