Software inspection is one of software engineering's best practices for detecting and removing defects early in the development process. However, the prevalence of manual activities and face-to-face meetings within software inspections hinder their applicability in the context of global software development, where software engineering activities are spread across multiple sites and even multiple countries.In this article, we describe a web-based tool, called the Internet-Based Inspection System (IBIS), that aims to support geographically dispersed inspection teams. On the basis of findings from empirical studies of software inspections, the IBIS tool adopts a reengineered inspection process to minimize synchronous activities and coordination problems. We present the underlying process model, how the tool is used within the inspection stages, and experiences using the IBIS tool as the enabling infrastructure for distributed software inspections.
Achieving agreement with respect to software requirements is a collaborative process that traditionally relies on same-time, same-place interactions. As the trend towards geographically distributed software development continues, co-located meetings are becoming increasingly problematic. Our research investigates the impact of computer-mediated communication on the performance of distributed client/developer teams involved in collaborative development of a requirements specification. Drawing on media selection theories, we posit that a combination of lean and rich media is needed for an effective process of requirements negotiations when stakeholders are geographically dispersed. In this paper we present an empirical study which investigates the performance of six educational global project teams of which negotiation process used both asynchronous text-based as well as synchronous videoconferencing-based communication modes. Findings indicate that requirements negotiations are more effective when the groups conducted asynchronous structured discussion of requirements issues prior to the synchronous negotiation meeting. Asynchronous discussions were useful in resolving issues related to uncertainty in requirements, thus allowing synchronous negotiations to focus more on removing ambiguities in the requirements
Important and yet very difficult process in software development, requirements engineering is plagued with additional challenges in the emergent dynamics of geographically distributed software teams. Our hypothesis is that a mix of lean and rich communication media are needed towards increasing the effectiveness of meetings in reaching mutual agreement when stakeholders are geographically dispersed.We studied tool-supported remote inspections in six educational global project teams in a multicultural software development environment. In this paper we present the preliminary results from comparing the effectiveness of the requirements negotiations when preceded by the asynchronous discussions to those negotiations with no prior asynchronous discussions
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