Mid Sweden University

This study focuses on agile systems development teams which work remotely during the COVID pandemic. Purpose: To identify the missing topics in informal communication and the relationship between them and team collaboration. Method: Survey is used to collect nominal data, ordinal data and qualitative data of text. 101 people participated in the survey. Analysis: An independent T-test, Spearman's rank correlation and content analysis are conducted. Result: There is a lack of discussion topics on personal information (e.g. a deeper insight into a person’s private life), social conversations (e.g. greetings and questions about weekend plans), support (e.g. giving tips and asking for help) and complaints (e.g. frustration regarding work) when they are teleworking during the COVID pandemic. Conversational topics on personal information, social conversations, support and complaints have a weak positive association with teamwork. Topics on personal information and social conversations are more strongly associated with teamwork than topics on support and complaints. The most striking results are the lack of social conversations in the age group between 30 and 39 years and those whose years of experience are between one and three years. Discussion and Conclusion: It is possible that the magnitude of topic shortages changes depending on the age and years of experience of team members, which may be a factor in how well team collaboration works. It may also become a factor determining the quality of team collaboration that causes teams to take proactive steps to increase the amount of informal communication. This study proposes to increase the amount of topics of personal information and social conversations and take serious measures to increase the amount of social conversations if the team is based on many team members whose age is between 30 and 39 years and whose years of experience are between one and three years.