Collaboration Tool Choices and Use in Remote Software Teams: Emerging Results from an Ongoing Study

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, more software teams than ever find themselves working in a remote model with team members separated by location, timezone, and working hours. This working model is expected to persist post-pandemic as companies explore the benefits of hybrid working. Software teams have always been reliant on tools to help them build software. Now they find themselves wholly reliant on tools to help them collaborate online. Surprisingly, there has been little research to date on which collaboration tools are used, how they are chosen, how they are used, and what challenges are faced when using such tools. This short paper offers emerging findings from an ongoing study in which we are interviewing software professionals about these questions. The insights are preliminary in that we are still conducting additional interviews beyond the ones reported here, yet some common themes are already emerging. Among others, we highlight the following: choice of tools made by the teams is opportunistic; teams adapt existing collaboration practices to utilize the tools better when working remotely; and a persistent problem exists of being unable to find information across chats, emails, and documents.