B. Meyer, J.R. Nawrocki, and B. Walter (Eds.): CEE-SET 2007, LNCS 5082, pp. 208–222, 2008. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2008 In-Time Role-Specific Notification as Formal Means to Balance Agile Practices in Global Software Development Settings Dindin Wahyudin 1 , Matthias Heindl 2 , Benedikt Eckhard 1 , Alexander Schatten 1 , and Stefan Biffl 1 1 Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria {Dindin,Eckhard,Schatten,Biffl}@ifs.tuwien.ac.at 2 Support Center Configuration Management Siemens Program and Systems Engineering, Vienna, Austria {matthias.a.heindl}@siemens.com Abstract. In global software development (GSD) projects, distributed teams collaborate to deliver high-quality software. Project managers need to control these development projects, which increasingly adopt agile practices. However, in a distributed project a major challenge is to keep all team members aware of recent changes of requirements and project status without providing too little or too much information for each role. In this paper we introduce a framework to define notification for development team members that allows a) measurement of notification effectiveness, efficiency, and cost; b) formalizing key communi- cation in an agile environment; and c) providing a method and a tool to imple- ment communication support. We illustrate, with an example scenario from an industry background, the concept and report results from an initial empirical evaluation. From the evaluation it follows that the concept allows determining and increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of key communication in a global software development project in a sufficiently formal way without com- promising the use of agile practices. Keywords: Software project management, Software process improvement, Methods and tools of software development, Agile practices in global software development, Context-specific notification. 1 Introduction Today business competition forces highly distributed and global software development (GSD) players to be more responsive and adaptable to uncertainty during development processes (e.g., changes of requirements, technologies implementation;involvement of partners/subcontractors), especially in novel product development [14].