experienced professionals. The answers to the
research questions and the contributions of this paper
are presented below.
Two of the three research questions had
affirmative answers. Thus, it was confirmed a
positive relation between informal communication
and software project success when considerate both
efficiency and project staff aspects. This result is in
line with the literature which emphasizes the
importance of informal communication in projects.
On the other hand, unlike the literature, the
benefits were achieved in waterfall projects only, not
on agile projects. This is reasonable to infer that on
agile projects, in which the informal communication
is quite common, people might not see additional
benefits on “additional” informal communication.
These results also point out to the fact we should
perform deeper research on hybrid approaches, given
its not conclusive results.
This research points out on informal
communication positive influence on customer
satisfaction. Despite being cited positively in some
interviews, most respondents highlighted that formal
communication (i.e., the reverse of informal) is the
most important one when dealing with the customer.
Recovering that this result applies to software
development projects, it is possible to infer that part of
this formal communication tendency/preference to
overcome the challenges related requirements
definition through a less flexible process at all. Maybe
team members expected the benefit is to avoid software
specification and validation conflicts for instance.
The contributions of this research are to overcome
the issues and increase the benefits of making the
projects more successfully at larger organizations,
such as the researched Bank. As future works, we
suggest: to conduct quantitative research to inquire
the relationships suggested by this research, aiming to
the generalization of the results; to investigate the
other communication patterns in addition to the
formality line; to deep understand the specific cases
where informal communication benefits different
project approaches such as agile, waterfall, and
hybrid approaches.
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