SECTION I.
IntroductionThe work presented in this paper is ongoing for more than six years based on an initial research project funded by the US National Science Foundation with the participation of universities from US, Turkey, Panama and the UK. The original project focused on the investigation of software development teams working over different time zones. The project utilized student teams to observe communication, collaboration and coordination patterns. The project used industrial advisory roles to gain an understanding of the logistics involved in real GSD projects, as well as issues relating to the way individuals participate in GSD teams and fulfill different roles. The project funding completion did not disrupt the on going research, which involved further institution allowing the researchers to investigate different team structures, cultural differences, software development tasks and GSD coordination.The research is predominantly based on the observation of pilots involving student groups organized in GSD projects including time zone differences, multi-cultural teams and the use of computersupported cooperative work tools for communication, file sharing, data repository and collaborative authoring. In this paper we will discuss two pilots involving six universities, three from Palestine and three from Egypt. These institutions participated in a EU funded project developing a joint postgraduate degree in software engineering and their students were trained in various aspects of distributed teamwork and GSD.At earlier stage of this work, emphasis was given on issues such as coding mechanisms for communication in GSD, gamification and the role of culture in distributed software teams. During the past couple of years, the research branched out towards the role of data analytics in GSD and how data visualization would assist in understanding patterns of communication and collaboration in GSD projects.As we will discuss in the following pages, there are two main drivers for using data analytics in this project, (i) obvious benefits for learning teams, as instructors are able to identify potential issues with individual students or certain teams, (ii) evident benefits for facilitating performance management of software development activities.The work presented in this paper is in line with existing work on tools supporting offshore software development focusing on the use of sociograms and the visualization of dependencies [5] [11]. Our work from several pilot studies focuses on understanding the inter-team interactions in a way similar to other works on awareness of inter-team development [17], human activities in software development and group awareness enhancing collaboration [24].
SECTION II.Background on GSD