Supporting Collaboration in Global Software Engineering

Abstract

More and more, software engineering projects are no longer carried out in a single office building, but instead in multiple dislocated office buildings or even from home. When the development process is distributed between several geographically dispersed locations this is known as Global Software Engineering or GSE. The team members working on the project are separated geographically, temporally and/or socio-culturally and the existence of these three distances makes coordination, communication and cooperation much harder. This brings us to the main goal of this dissertation which is: “To understand which technological support is needed for Global Software Engineering teams to be able to collaborate effectively”. More specifically, we investigated what types of information that are readily available in the co-located setting but not in a distributed setting, are potentially most valuable and how these can be made available to GSE teams as well. To reach this goal we have divided the dissertation in two parts. In the first part, we zoomed in on one specific shortcoming of the distributed setting: it is impossible to overhear conversations of non-collocated colleagues. We investigated the problem itself (RQ1) but also what general consequences introducing such a solution has in a distributed setting (RQ2). Subsequently, keeping what we have learned in the back of our minds, we zoomed out and investigated both the information needs of distributed software engineers (RQ3) and how to leverage the main contributions of this dissertation in practice (RQ4). The main conclusion of this dissertation is: (i) that in order to truly support distributed software engineering teams, support environments for them should consider collaboration a first-class citizen and (ii) the most important information needs of such teams are project related communication with the customer and the happiness of team members.