A Grounded Theory of Coordination in Remote-First and Hybrid Software Teams

While the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on software professionals and organizations are difficult to predict, it seems likely that working from home, remote-first teams, distributed teams, and hybrid (part-remote/part-office) teams will be more common. It is therefore important to investigate the challenges that software teams and organizations face with new remote and hybrid work. Consequently, this paper reports a year-long, participant-observation, constructivist grounded theory study investigating the impact of working from home on software development. This study resulted in a theory of software team coordination. Briefly, shifting from in-office to at-home work fundamentally altered coordination within software teams. While group cohesion and more effective communication appear protective, coordination is undermined by distrust, parenting and communication bricolage. Poor coordination leads to numerous problems including misunderstandings, help requests, lower job satisfaction among team members, and more ill-defined tasks. These problems, in turn, reduce overall project success and prompt professionals to alter their software development processes (in this case, from Scrum to Kanban). Our findings suggest that software organizations with many remote employees can improve performance by encouraging greater engagement within teams and supporting employees with family and childcare responsibilities.