Distributed development in an intra-national, intra-organisational context

Abstract

This paper reports from a study investigating distributed development in an intra-national and intra-organisational company context. The study gives an insight into issues related to, and strategies for successful distributed development seen in a project at Ericsson Microwave Systems. We conclude that regular, informal communication is the single most important factor for success in the project, with important roles in improving motivation and coordination. The leader's role in setting clear and transparent project priorities, and the use of iterative development methods with regular deliverables between sites, are identified as key elements of success. The context of the study is a relatively undemanding but common distributed development context, and the issues raised and strategies found to be effective are likely to be relevant to broader distributed development enterprises.

Collaborating with ‘virtual strangers’: Towards developing a framework for leadership in distributed teams

“…We take this as evidence that clear distinctions of leadership style between distributed and collocated teams is blurring, as has been indicated in related literature (Lindqvist et al, 2006). And while leaders from our study do play a role in their organization's teams, this role is not readily evident or markedly salient.…”

In Strangers We Trust? Findings of an Empirical Study of Distributed Teams

“…The importance of trust in distributed software engineering teams has been recognized by several researchers [17,32,10,21,37]. Their findings reinforced the critical role trust plays in performance and further found that trust needs to be established early during team evolution by meeting team expectations.…”

A rule‐based model for customized risk identification and evaluation of task assignment alternatives in distributed software development projects

“…As a result, decreases in productivity or increases in the number of defects have been reported. Their causes include communication problems between sites , insufficient knowledge at one of the sites , mistrust between sites , or decreased workforce motivation because of the fear of job loss . Therefore, they represent a set of GSD‐specific project risks that might be relevant in addition to the typical project risks.…”