Effects of Geographical, Socio-cultural and Temporal Distances on Communication in Global Software Development during Requirements Change Management - A Pilot Study.
Abstract
Trend of software development is changing rapidly most of the software development organizations are trying to globalize their activities throughout the world. This trend leads towards a phenomenon called Global Software Development (GSD).The main reason behind the software globalization is its various benefits. Besides these benefits, software organizations are facing various challenges. One of these challenges is communication which is considered a big challenge in GSD and it becomes more complicated during the Requirements Change Management (RCM) process due to three factors, they are Geographical, Socio-cultural and Temporal distances. This paper presents a framework which shows the effect of these factors on communication during RCM process in GSD. Communication is the core function of collaboration which allows information to be exchanged between the team members. A pilot study has been conducted in three GSD organizations. A quantitative research method has been used to collect data. The findings from the survey data show that these three factors have a strong negative impact on communication process in GSD. 1 INTRODUCTION Global Software Development (GSD) or Global Software Engineering (GSE) is the development of software projects consisting of teams working together to accomplish project goals from various geographical locations (Biffl and Halling, 2003; Helena et al., 2006; Šmite et al., 2008). About a decade ago, different experiments have done in order to develop the software projects at geographically distributed locations. Most of the organizations try to find solutions around the world and GSD appears to be a good option in such an environment (Rafael et al., 2006). The acceptance of the GSD process is to get the business benefits and competitive advantages. Software companies are distributing their work globally in order to get benefits such as low cost, good productivity, access to skilled work forces and access to market (Khan et al., 2012). Along with benefits, most of the studies have discussed some issues related to the distribution of work and the constraints associated with it (Helena et al., 2006; Khan et al., 2012; Khan et al., 2011)