Global software development and collaboration

Abstract

While organisations recognise the advantages offered by global software development, there are many socio-technical barriers that affect successful collaboration in this inter-cultural environment. In this paper we present a review of the global software development literature where we highlight collaboration problems experienced by a cross-section of organisations in twenty-six studies. We also look at the literature to answer how organisations are over-coming these barriers in practice. We build on our previous study on global software development where we define collaboration as four practices related to agreeing, allocating, and planning goals, objectives, and tasks among distributed teams.We found that the key barriers to collaboration are geographic, temporal, cultural, and linguistic distance; the primary solutions to overcoming these barriers include site visits, synchronous communication technology, and knowledge sharing infrastructure to capture implicit knowledge and make it explicit.

Overcoming Cultural Distance in Social OER Environments

“…As argued by Agarwal (2007), there are various challenges to knowledge sharing while so-called cultural distance becomes highly important in a context where people deal within online social environments. The finding is in line with the studies of Noll et al (2010) and Pallot et al (2010) that deal with collaboration across distance. However, the current literature has been very limited in studies that could inform the domain regarding how strong those cultural barriers are perceived across nations, within educator and learner communities that adopt these social OER environments.…”

“…As elaborated by Agarwal et al (2007), knowledge-sharing activities of teachers and learners can be highly influenced by culture. Similarly, Noll et al (2010) and Pallot et al (2010) evidenced that culture and language distance are two of the strongest barriers in distributed collaboration, and this sets the focus for our study.…”

“…A particular barrier towards cultural distance that was found in the literature was related to knowledge sharing and collaboration (Noll et al, 2010;Pallot et al, 2010). This barrier was related to language component of cultural distance, as well as the perceived difference of the home and host context.…”

“…This barrier was related to language component of cultural distance, as well as the perceived difference of the home and host context. As a common language is one of the greatest challenges for organizing distributed work (Noll et al, 2010;Pallot et al, 2010), we focused on this in our context. In our setting, teachers and learners are connected within an international community.…”

Globalization of Software Development Teams

“…Also, based on the context and tone used, a word or phrase can have several different meanings. A common language helps to overcome cultural barriers and sort out misunderstandings, but it is not necessarily enough; for those who learned a language as nonnative speakers, a common language can be very puzzling (Noll et al, 2010). Although Western culture currently dominates much of the business world, Asian markets are expanding rapidly.…”