Does distance still matter? Reporting on a comparative analysis of four ethnographic studies of global software development, this article analyzes the fundamental aspects of distance as depicted in the famous paper "Distance Matters." The results suggest that, although while common ground, collaboration readiness, and organizational management are still important aspects for distributed collaboration, the arguments concerning coupling of work and collaboration technology readiness need to be refined. We argue that in working remotely, closely coupled work tasks encourage remote workers to spend the extra effort required in articulation of work to make the collaboration function. Also we find that people in distributed software development have already made collaborative technologies part of their work, and individuals are comfortable with them; thus, collaboration technology readiness takes a different shape in this setting.

Using ethnographic data, we provide a critical reflection on the discrepancies between the application of agile development principles and the conditions which render these principles effective for global software development work. This reflection is based on the analysis of a failed collaboration within a global software project, which relied heavily on feedback from mundane project tools utilized for everyday coordination and monitoring. Our study reveals that these tools hid serious issues relating to both the distribution of socio-technical skills and a discharge of accountability in task execution. As a result, markers of complex collaborative problems were concealed. Furthermore, the imbalance evident in outsourcing setups, which is enacted through high and low status task distribution among partners, further compounds collaboration problems by emphasizing assumptions about remote workers in the absence of direct forms of knowledge interchange.

We report on an ethnographic study of an outsourcing global software development (GSD) setup between a Danish IT company and an Indian IT vendor developing a system to replace a legacy system for social services administration in Denmark. Physical distance and GSD collaboration issues tend to be obvious explanations for why GSD tasks fail to reach completion; however, we account for the difficulties within the technical nature of the software system task. We use the framework of information infrastructure to show how replacing a legacy system in governmental information infrastructures includes the work of tracing back to knowledge concerning law, technical specifications, as well as how information infrastructures have dynamically evolved over time. Not easily carried out in a GSD setup is the work around technical tasks that requires careful examination of mundane technical aspects, standards, and bureaucratic forms, as well as the excavation work that keeps the information infrastructure afloat.

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