Quality Indicators on Global Software Development Projects: Does "Getting to Know You" Really Matter?

In Spring 2008, five student teams were put into competition to develop software for a Cambodian client. Each extended team comprised students distributed across a minimum of three locations, drawn from the US, India, Thailand and Cambodia. This paper describes a couple of exercises conducted with students to examine their basic awareness of the countries of their collaborators and competitors, and to assess their knowledge of their own extended team members during the course of the project. The results from these exercises are examined in conjunction with the high-level communication patterns exhibited by the participating teams and provisional findings are drawn with respect to quality, as measured through a final product selection process. Initial implications for practice are discussed.

[1]  Audris Mockus,et al.  Shared Mental Models and Coordination in Large-Scale, Distributed Software Development , 2001, ICIS.

[2]  Vicki L. Almstrum,et al.  Interaction factors in software development performance in distributed student teams in computer science , 2001 .

[3]  C. Scharff,et al.  Preparing Computer Science Students for Global Software Development , 2006, Proceedings. Frontiers in Education. 36th Annual Conference.

[4]  Brenda Huettner,et al.  Managing Virtual Teams: Getting The Most From Wikis, Blogs, And Other Collaborative Tools , 2006 .

[5]  James D. Herbsleb,et al.  Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination , 2007, Future of Software Engineering (FOSE '07).

[6]  Mary E. Helander,et al.  Seeing inside: Using social network analysis to understand patterns of collaboration and coordination in global software teams , 2007, International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2007).

[7]  Olly Gotel,et al.  Introducing Global Supply Chains into Software Engineering Education , 2007, SEAFOOD.

[8]  Daniela E. Damian,et al.  Collaboration Patterns and the Impact of Distance on Awareness in Requirements-Centred Social Networks , 2007, 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2007).

[9]  Olly Gotel,et al.  Working Across Borders: Overcoming Culturally-Based Technology Challenges in Student Global Software Development , 2008, 2008 21st Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training.

[10]  Alok Aggarwal,et al.  Emerging marketsLabor supply in the Indian IT industry , 2008, CACM.

[11]  Des Phal,et al.  Impacting Global Software Development Through Socialization Activities in Virtual World Environments , 2008 .

[12]  Laurie A. Williams,et al.  Predicting failures with developer networks and social network analysis , 2008, SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16.

[13]  Peter J. Denning,et al.  Getting to "we" , 2008, CACM.

[14]  Jay F. Nunamaker,et al.  Principles for effective virtual teamwork , 2009, CACM.

[15]  Thanwadee Sunetnanta,et al.  A Global and Competition-Based Model for Fostering Technical and Soft Skills in Software Engineering Education , 2009, 2009 22nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training.

[16]  Olly Gotel,et al.  From Student to Software Engineer in the Indian IT Industry: A Survey of Training , 2010, 2010 23rd IEEE Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training.