How Artefacts Influence the Construction of Communications and Contexts during Collaboration in an Agile Software Development Team

This paper reports a cognitive ethnography study on the communication process of an Agile software development team in an industry. The aim of the study is to understand how physical artefacts influence the construction of communications during collaboration. We used a stimulus and response method to uncover correlation patterns of the physical artefact-communication during specific contexts of communications. We found preliminary evidence that the physical artefacts influence the communication process in a mutually constraining relationship with the contexts. In which the context is made up of the teams’ practice that includes how they collaborate, the physical setting, situations, and participation role.