experienced professionals. The answers to the 
research questions and the contributions of this paper 
are presented below. 
Two of the three research questions had 
affirmative answers. Thus, it was confirmed a 
positive relation between informal communication 
and software project success when considerate both 
efficiency and project staff aspects. This result is in 
line with the literature which emphasizes the 
importance of informal communication in projects.  
On the other hand, unlike the literature, the 
benefits were achieved in waterfall projects only, not 
on agile projects. This is reasonable to infer that on 
agile projects, in which the informal communication 
is quite common, people might not see additional 
benefits on “additional” informal communication. 
These results also point out to the fact we should 
perform deeper research on hybrid approaches, given 
its not conclusive results. 
This research points out on informal 
communication positive influence on customer 
satisfaction. Despite being cited positively in some 
interviews, most respondents highlighted that formal 
communication (i.e., the reverse of informal) is the 
most important one when dealing with the customer. 
Recovering that this result applies to software 
development projects, it is possible to infer that part of 
this formal communication tendency/preference to 
overcome the challenges related requirements 
definition through a less flexible process at all.  Maybe 
team members expected the benefit is to avoid software 
specification and validation conflicts for instance. 
The contributions of this research are to overcome 
the issues and increase the benefits of making the 
projects more successfully at larger organizations, 
such as the researched Bank. As future works, we 
suggest: to conduct quantitative research to inquire 
the relationships suggested by this research, aiming to 
the generalization of the results; to investigate the 
other communication patterns in addition to the 
formality line; to deep understand the specific cases 
where informal communication benefits different 
project approaches such as agile, waterfall, and 
hybrid approaches. 
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