Agile Software Development in a Remotely Working Geographically Distributed Team: A Systematic Review

Abstract

In recent years, the distribution of software development has gained widespread popularity. Among the obvious reasons are the wish of companies to save production costs and reduce the time to market. Besides this, the latest years COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the transition of many software development projects into a geographically distributed environment where most employees work remotely. Using Agile practices in such a setup brings a lot of new challenges. This paper presents a systematic literature review of the studies that discuss the use of Agile methods in globally distributed projects, particularly when team members work remotely or from home. Using our search criteria, we found 307 papers, of which 20 were relevant to our research. The results outlined in this review will help researchers and practitioners in understanding the challenges involved in using Agile methods by geographically distributed remotely working teams and figure out how to tackle these challenges to increase the efficiency of project management.