Loss of Communication in Remote Scrum Teams: Assistance System to support Reflection of Interactions and Collaboration

Communication and collaboration are crucial success factors for IT projects, especially in agile software development. Due to increased remote work and global teams triggered by the covid-19 pandemic, the way people communicate and collaborate at work changes. To investigate how this impacts agile teams we conducted expert interviews and a literature review. The results are summarized in this paper and demonstrate that there is a loss of communication, collaboration and social interaction, which may potentially result in harmful long-term effects. The consequences include a decline in trust, psychological safety and engagement. Collaboration tools can help to address these novel challenges. We give an overview of existing tools and applications to promote remote collaboration. Furthermore, we present a concept for an assistance system for reflection to improve remote teamwork and individual ways of working in Scrum teams. Nevertheless, tools and technologies have limitations and cannot replace the full spectrum of human face-to-face communication.