Using Experimental Games to Understand Communication and Trust in Agile Software Teams

Trust plays an important role in enabling software development teams to function effectively. Trust between individual team members has been shown to improve the independence of software teams and reduce the amount of project management effort required by those teams. Our main aims are to investigate (i) the impact communication has on trust between team members in Agile software development and (ii) the usefulness of iterated games as an experimental methodology. We use Game Theory in a simulated Agile development environment. We run 28 iterated games with 56 practitioner and student participants. Stand-up meetings are used as the communicat ion in tervent i on compared to games without such meetings to assess the levels o f trust. Our findings are that increased communication has a very large positive effect upon the level of trust between team members in an Agile setting. Our results suggest that communication improves trust in development teams. Opportunities for communication should be built into development processes. Experimental games are a complementary (to qualitative approaches) and effective method for investigating human issues in software engineering.