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Global software development and collaboration: barriers and solutions

Authors:

Ita RichardsonAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Inroads, Volume 1, Issue 3

Pages 66 - 78

https://doi.org/10.1145/1835428.1835445

Published: 01 September 2011 Publication History

Abstract

While organisations recognise the advantages offered by global software development, many socio-technical barriers affect successful collaboration in this inter-cultural environment. In this paper, we present a review of the global software development literature where we highlight collaboration problems experienced by a cross-section of organisations in twenty-six studies. We also look at the literature to answer how organisations are overcoming these barriers in practice. We build on our previous study on global software development where we define collaboration as four practices related to agreeing, allocating, and planning goals, objectives, and tasks among distributed teams.

We found that the key barriers to collaboration are geographic, temporal, cultural, and linguistic distance; the primary solutions to overcoming these barriers include site visits, synchronous communication technology, and knowledge sharing infrastructure to capture implicit knowledge and make it explicit.

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Index Terms

Global software development and collaboration: barriers and solutions
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

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Published In

cover image ACM Inroads

ACM Inroads Volume 1, Issue 3

September 2010

90 pages

ISSN:2153-2184

EISSN:2153-2192

DOI:10.1145/1835428

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Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 September 2011

Published in INROADS Volume 1, Issue 3

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https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-6567-0.ch010
Anwar RRehman MRehman HNauman SKhan AMalik M(2024)Breaking Down Barriers: The Moderating Role of Organizational Support in Facilitating Knowledge Sharing Among Software DevelopersSage Open10.1177/2158244024125656814:2Online publication date: 31-May-2024
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