Global Software Development Challenges: A Case Study on Temporal, Geographical and Socio-Cultural Distance

By H. Olsson, Eoin Ó Conchúir, Pär J. Ågerfalk, Brian Fitzgerald. International Conference on Global Software Engineering, 2006

357 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global software development (GSD) is a phenomenon that is receiving considerable interest from companies all over the world. In GSD, stakeholders from different national and organizational cultures are involved in developing software and the many benefits include access to a large labour pool, cost advantage and round-the-clock development. However, GSD is technologically and organizationally complex and presents a variety of challenges to be managed by the software development team. In particular, temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances impose problems not experienced in traditional systems development. In this paper, we present findings from a case study in which we explore the particular challenges associated with managing GSD. Our study also reveals some of the solutions that are used to deal with these challenges. We do so by empirical investigation at three US based GSD companies operating in Ireland. Based on qualitative interviews we present challenges related to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a1f49dd271d31a8750a5f96f664b6683d18cc2a

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In Computer Science Applications

In Information Systems

In Sociology and Political Science

Claes Wohlin

Citations in the corpus

Challenges and barriers in virtual teams: a literature review (2020, background): “, [116, 142, 188]) showed that low trust caused by distance affected workers’ identification of themselves as belonging to a team spanning locations.”
Empirical evidence in global software engineering: a systematic review (2010, background): “Although distributed software development typically relies on formal mechanisms, there is a growing trend towards balancing agile and distributed approaches to meet the challenges of communication, control and trust (Ramesh et al. 2006; Holmström et al. 2006).”
Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination (2007, background): “There are many reasons for this difference [11, 43], including temporal distance (different time zones), socio-cultural distance (language and culture), and geographic distance (making travel difficult).”