Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2014

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Agile Development, Collaboration, Distributed Software Development, Exponential Random Graph Models, Social Network Analysis

Discipline

Management Information Systems | Organizational Communication | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

ICSE 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 31 - June 7, Hyderabad, India

First Page

199

Last Page

210

ISBN

9781450327565

Identifier

10.1145/2568225.2568279

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2568225.2568279

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