Decision making issues in software engineering: investigating factors affecting team and role conflicts in collaborating virtual teams

software teams is a constant phenomenon. These issues are complex, demanding, time consuming, and any outcomes directly affect the project’s success. The particularities of software engineering, the special nature of software teams, and the specific requirements of constantly collaborating parties, are responsible for several unique aspects of these decision-making issues. Issues concerned with initial phases of the project are indisputably the most critical, such as avoiding and resolving conflicts while forming project teams and allocating roles. Team and role conflicts become even more difficult to predict and overcome when virtual teams are collaborating over software processes, mainly because the distance, time and cultural differences between the involved parties. This paper discusses decision-making issues in collaborating virtual software teams. It concentrates on team and role conflicts and identifies the factors that affect team formation and role allocation in such teams along with their origins. It also briefly covers an existing approach of treating this domain using object-oriented methodology. Next it considers the peculiarities of virtual teams and outlines some of the main changes on the team formation and role allocation processes, the affecting factors (and origins), and the way they affect these processes. Then it underlines the inadequacies of the existing approach and suggests a new revised approached, focusing on the introduced aspects of collaborating virtual teams. Finally, it concerns the changes on the working ways in the immediate future and it attempts to identify some avenues for further research.