Fear and distrust in global software engineering projects

Abstract

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.

Expectations and Achievements: A Longitudinal Study on an Offshoring Strategy

“…We interpret these results as signs of skepticism in the rationale behind the offshoring decision enforced by the corporate management. If the further maturation of the strategy does not bring the desired levels of quality and productivity (which seemed to be more important from the points of view of the interviewees) it is not unlikely that unwillingness to collaborate, opportunism, self-protective behavior and distrust could emerge, as found in a similar case of an enforced offshoring reported in [17].…”

A Canvas for Establishing Global Software Development Collaborations

“…Trust is considered to be one of the keys for establishing e↵ective, productive, reliable, and longitude collaborative social relationships between teams in global software development contexts [22,23,40]. Trust can be defined as the willingness of individuals to cooperate with others based on the belief that partners are reliable, competent and will do actions which are beneficial for the cooperation rather than for individual purposes [40].…”

“…Trust promises to create the ability of remote collaboration sites to work together, and to build up the feeling of teamness. Trust stimulates the willingness of sites to communicate and work towards the completion of shared project goals -not "we and you" relations but "us" [22,29]. Lack of trust might lead to a situation of non-cooperation, social conflicts, absence of information exchange, overall decrease in productivity and end product quality, and eventually to job dissatisfaction among employees [29].…”

“…Such e↵orts, for instance, are face-to-face visits, frequent remote communication via a rich variety of tools, sta↵ exchanges, socio-cultural trainings, social activities. Trust needs to be built and maintained through the whole partnership history from the first collaboration stages till its end [11,22,25,29,33,40].…”

“…Although there are already many scientific papers and experiences available with respect to challenges, risks, mitigation advice, best actions and practices regarding establishing GSD collaborations, they are mainly focusing on specific areas such as examining trust or communication aspects [21][22][23][24]. Therefore the question how they can be used and integrated in an overall guide for setting up GSD collaborations still remains unclear.…”