Global software development (GSD) projects use a variety of communication tools, such as teleconferences, email, and instant messaging to overcome the challenges caused by distribution. The use of different tools implies different communication needs and practices within the project. Media synchronicity theory (MST) breaks communication down into two processesconveyance of information and convergence of understandingand communication media capabilities into five: immediacy of feedback, parallelism, symbol variety, rehearsability, and reprocessability. According to MST, media capabilities differ in support for conveyance and convergence, and for good performance, there should be match between media capabilities and communication process needed in a given task. In this paper, we present our qualitative study on communication in GSD. We interviewed 79 individuals from 12 GSD projects. We discuss which communication tools were used and how. We analyze the tool use and articulated rationale for choosing the tools for various tasks in distributed software development based on the two communicative processes and five media properties suggested by MST. We found evidence supporting the applicability of MST as an aid in selecting communication tools for GSD projects.as participants had freedom to choose when to respond [18], and could help to maintain informal conversations between different sites of operation [13,19]. Schiller and Mandviwalla [20] have evaluated the MST [4] based on 10 criteria proposed by Shoemaker et al. [21] for the development of new social science theories. Schiller and Mandviwalla conclude that MST seems to be a suitable and powerful theory to analyze media choice in virtual teams, even though it is a new theory and thus lacking a larger body of empirical evidence supporting it [20].Empirical evidence supporting MST has been reported in earlier work. In a study consisting of undergraduate students, the differences between convergence and conveyance as communicative processes were identified in tasks related to decision-making [22]. Whereas many tasks involve both conveying information and converging on shared meanings, it was found that a single communication media is often unable to both convey information and converge knowledge [22]. As conveyance and convergence are ,as cognitive processes, largely different from each other, MST recommends the use of multiple communication media when performing a task [4].Further evidence supporting MST was reported in a study with four virtual software teams [23] and eight virtual teams working with educational services [24]. The results indicate that high synchronicity was preferred for tasks requiring convergence, whereas conveyance of information was effective with tools of low synchronicity [23,24]. It was also found that synchronous and asynchronous communication media augmented each other, as synchronous media was used as an information-rich communication channel and asynchronous media as a semantically rich channel [23].Earlier studies evaluating IM usin...

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SUMMARY When global software engineering (GSE) is understood as knowledge intensive collaborative work, many of the reasons for the problems encountered in GSE projects can be traced back to the social conditions framing the collaboration between people at different physical sites. A total of 59 interviews were conducted in eight GSE projects of two large software companies with sites in Finland and other countries. As a result of categorization of problems related to group relations, the lack of trust between the main site and the other sites, and the fear of negative personal consequences among the project employees at the main site due to introduction of GSE were found to be the major problems in the projects. Our analysis suggests that poorly communicated reasoning for GSE can lay the ground for fear and for distrust between employees at remote sites. Unfulfilled cognitive expectations and fear related to one's professional future were found to be the sources of distrust toward employees at off‐site locations. The main contribution of this study is a novel empirical description of the linkages between fear and distrust in GSE. In addition, practical implications to effectively implement an organizational change from collocated development to distributed development are suggested. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When globally distributed software development (GSD) is understood as knowledge intensive collaborative work, many of the reasons for problems encountered in GSD projects can be traced back to social conditions framing the collaboration between people at onsite and offsite. A total of 59 interviews were conducted in 8 GSD projects of two major software companies located in Finland. As a result of categorization of problems related to group relations in GSD projects, the lack of trust between onsite and offsite and fears of losing jobs at onsite was found as major problems in the early phases of the projects. Our analysis suggests that poorly communicated reasons GSD can cause severe problems in collaboration between people by laying the ground for fears and for distrust between sites. The study contributes to the GSD research by creating a novel empirical description of the linkages between fear and distrust in GSD.

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