Storytelling – a Method to Start Knowledge Transfer in Offshore Software Development Teams

Abstract

Over the past few years IT offshoring has become one of the most important corporate strategies in the software industry and is facing a diversity of challenges. One of them is the efficient transfer of knowledge between two companies, separated significantly in terms of time zone, geographical and cultural distance. Cultural aspects hence represent one of the most critical elements. While considering the software development process, requirements engineering is one of the most critical steps and implies an immense communication effort. When now the cross-cultural layer is added it seems to be a hardly solvable task. However, actual research on this section of knowledge transfer within offshore software development under cross-cultural settings is still limited. This is a research in progress paper using a qualitative research setting carried out with an explanatory case study involving the software requirements specification (SRS) as the knowledge to be transferred between IT companies in Germany and India. The basis of this paper is that, for the start of successful transfer of knowledge we suggest the storytelling methodology as a suitable tool to overcome these difficulties. Thus we are asking, how storytelling affects the inception of knowledge transfer in offshore software development projects.