Communication in teams is an important but difficult issue. In a Scrum development process, we use the Daily Scrum meetings to inform others about important problems, news and events in the project. When persons are absent due to holiday, illness or travel, they miss relevant information because there is no document that protocols the content of these meetings. We present a concept and a Twitter-like tool that improves communication in a Scrum development process. We take advantage out of the observation that many people do not like to create documentation but they do like to share what they did. We used the tool in industrial practice and observed an improvement in communication.
@cite_4: Agile software development methods are increasingly used in large-scale software development. This article summarizes some of the discussion on research challenges in large-scale agile development at a workshop at the International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2013), in the form of a research agenda.
@cite_1: 
@cite_3: Agile processes enable software development projects to react to rapid changes in the development environment. However, they are often criticized for not creating and maintaining standard documentation such as requirements and design documentation. The lack of documentation can be detrimental for maintaining knowledge, especially in the long run, because there is no explicit medium for communication to new people and among existing developers. This poses an important question: whether the use of agile processes in long run is feasible. In this paper, we presented a field study of an organization that has been using an agile process for more than 20 years and has been successful in maintaining knowledge over that period. Instead of written documentation, they use living documents, well-connected communication, and working software are prioritized as mediums for maintaining knowledge. However, success is not easily achieved. There are important factors that enable the organization to use the current practices successfully. These factors are: shared values, overlapping knowledge among team members, low turnover rate, and well-understood requirements.
@cite_0: Software engineering is a human task, and as such we must study what software engineers do and think. Understanding the normative practice of software engineering is the first step toward developing realistic solutions to better facilitate the engineering process. We conducted three studies using several data-gathering approaches to elucidate the patterns by which software engineers (SEs) use and update documentation. Our objective is to more accurately comprehend and model documentation use, usefulness, and maintenance, thus enabling better decision making and tool design by developers and project managers. Our results confirm the widely held belief that SEs typically do not update documentation as timely or completely as software process personnel and managers advocate. However, the results also reveal that out-of-date software documentation remains useful in many circumstances.
@cite_2: A system documentation process maturity model and assessment procedure were developed and used to assess 91 projects at 41 different companies over a seven year period. During this time the original version evolved into a total of four versions based on feedback from industry and the experience gained from the assessments. This paper reports the overall results obtained from the assessments which strongly suggest that the practice of documentation is not getting a passing grade in the software industry. The results show a clear maturity gap between documentation practices concerned with defining policy and practices concerned with adherence to those policies. The results further illustrate the need to recognize the importance of improving the documentation process, and to transform the good intentions into explicit policies and actions.
@cite_5: This paper highlights the results of a survey of software professionals. One of the goals of this survey was to uncover the perceived relevance (or lack thereof) of software documentation, and the tools and technologies used to maintain, verify and validate such documents. The survey results highlight the preferences for and aversions against software documentation tools. Participants agree that documentation tools should seek to better extract knowledge from core resources. These resources include the system's source code, test code and changes to both. Resulting technologies could then help reduce the effort required for documentation maintenance, something that is shown to rarely occur. Our data reports compelling evidence that software professionals value technologies that improve automation of the documentation process, as well as facilitating its maintenance.
One of the most important challenges in large Scrum teams is inter-team coordination @cite_4 . Coordination requires communication both between teams and within a team. @cite_3 shows in a case study that handling with knowledge over a longer period of time can only be managed with extensive communication. But important events that occur during development could be relevant to others and are often not sufficiently documented or communicated @cite_2 . Software developers do not update relevant documents, do not see their benefits and wish more automatic generation of documented content @cite_5 @cite_0 . An example of such a generation is an automatic summarizer for daily scrum meetings proposed by @cite_1 . Nevertheless there is a gap in the current state of the art on how developers of agile teams stay informed when being absent. Our proposed tool tries to fill this gap.