Distributed Agile Development Communication: An Agile Architecture Driven Framework

Agile methods depend on active communication and effective knowledge sharing among team members for producing high quality working software systems in short releases and iterations. However, effective communication in Distributed Agile Development (DAD) can be challenging due to a number of different factors, such as physical locations, multi-cultures and time-zones. The agile body of knowledge mainly discusses some technology and non-technology solutions and strategies to mitigate the DAD communication challenges from a project management perspective. Nevertheless, it has recently been argued that there is a need to understand and analyze DAD communication from other related but different perspectives, such as enterprise strategy, enterprise architecture and service management. Due to the fact that agile EA provides a holistic view and blueprint of the whole environment in which a number of projects are developed and managed, we attempt in this study to explore the effect of agile Enterprise Architecture (EA) on DAD communication. Particularly, we propose the development of an agile EA driven approach from the architecture body of knowledge for handling the DAD communication challenges that have not been thoroughly investigated before.