Does latitude hurt while longitude kills? geographical and temporal separation in a large scale software development project

Distributed software development allows firms to leverage cost advantages and place work near centers of competency. This distribution comes at a cost -- distributed teams face challenges from differing cultures, skill levels, and a lack of shared working hours. In this paper we examine whether and how geographic and temporal separation in a large scale distributed software development influences developer interactions. We mine the work item trackers for a large commercial software project with a globally distributed development team. We examine both the time to respond and the propensity of individuals to respond and find that when taken together, geographic distance has little effect, while temporal separation has a significant negative impact on the time to respond. However, both have little impact on the social network of individuals in the organization. These results suggest that while temporally distributed teams do communicate, it is at a slower rate, and firms may wish to locate partner teams in similar time zones for maximal performance.

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