RTDWD: Real-Time Distributed Wideband-Delphi for User Stories Estimation

This paper proposes the RTDWD (Real-time Distributed Wideband-Delphi) tool, a real-time collaborative web application for user stories estimation through the Wideband-Delphi method. RTDWD realizes, in a lightweight way, virtual meetings for a critical phase of the requirements management in distributed Agile development processes, such as Distributed eXtreme Programming. The web 2.0-based nature of RTDWD adds new communication modes to a distributed Agile development process, where a close real-time collaboration is needed but difficult to realize due to the geographic dislocation of team members. Features of RTDWD allow to take into consideration several scenarios where mobile devices (i.e. Pocket PCs and Smartphones) well substitute desktop and laptop computers. We present our experience in order to point out to the researcher community the usefulness of the RTDWD and, generally, of the lightweight real-time collaboration underlining the need to introduce new technologies on practices of distributed Agile processes.