Virtual Teams [Guest editors' introduction]

Over the past decades, today, and in the future, business contexts in software organizations and the common ways of developing software are changing dramatically. Formation of teams in distributed environments, virtual or not, calls for new ways of working across geographic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. This, however, also requires effective leadership approaches enabled through systems, processes, technology, and people. The authors pulled together this special issue to provide some ideas and strategies for practitioners and open questions for researchers. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/YxE6S6MM3Ws is an audio recording in which author IEEE Software Multimedia Editor Davide Falessi interviews Laurence Tratt and Adam Welc, guest editors of the magazine's September/October 2014 issue, about the field of programming languages.