An Exploratory Study of Developers' Toolbox in an Agile Team

Although Agile teams supposedly value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, tools still represent an important support for developers’ work. Existing studies investigate only partially tool usage in nonAgile teams. Moreover, it is not clear to which extent their findings are valid also for Agile teams. This study takes the first steps towards understanding tool usage in Agile teams by investigating the types and variety of tools used and the actual purpose for which they are employed. As expected, we found that communication accounts for an increased amount of time, but, surprisingly, a large share of it is represented by instant messaging or email rather than face-toface communication. Other findings show that developers’ toolbox contains only a very small number of tools and a relevant amount of time is spent on browsing the Internet and navigating through the file system.