Virtual Reality Collaboration Platform for Agile Software Development

Nowadays, most software teams use Scrum as their software development process framework. Scrum highly values collaboration and communication inside the team and aims to make them more flexible to spontaneous changes. However, due to the rise of working from home, many developers experienced a significant decrease in communication, social interactions, and a general feeling of social connectedness with their colleagues, which might impede the effectiveness of Scrum teams. To overcome these issues, we present a VR collaboration platform for Scrum meetings, called Virtual Reality-based Agile Collaboration Platform (VRACP). VRACP provides the visualization of and interaction with Scrum artifacts inside a realistic virtual office, the integration and synchronization of external data sources, remote collaboration, and human-like user representations. To evaluate whether VR can increase social connectedness in agile software development teams, we conducted a user study where our solution was compared to common web/desktop applications for Scrum meetings. The results suggest that although efficiency and effectiveness were reduced, it could indeed increase the feeling of being together, collaborating more naturally, and having more fun and motivation.