Agile Cognition: Discovering the Cognitive Artifacts Used for Project Management in Agile Software Development

Abstract

Using naturalistic decision making, cognitive artifacts help us understand the cognitive processes that take place on teams. For agile software development (ASD) teams, we focus on cognitive processes that take place during an iteration. We conducted four case studies of four different agile teams. Using media richness and media synchronicity theories, results suggest that ASD teams use multiple cognitive artifacts to plan and manage their iteration. The interactions with these artifacts include examples of lean and rich media, with ASD team members preferring richer media where more information is communicated accurately. Distributed cognition helps the ASD team both make sense of tasks in order to complete them on time for the client and cope with the complexity, uncertainty, and fast-paced nature of ASD. Our contribution includes a comprehensive list of cognitive artifacts and ASD team interactions categorized by media type, level of richness, information purpose, synchronicity, and usage purpose