Anh Nguyen-Duc

The impact of global dispersion on coordination, team performance and software quality – A systematic literature review

Abstract Context Global software development (GSD) contains different context setting dimensions, which are essential for effective teamwork and success of projects. Although considerable research effort has been made in this area, as yet, no agreement has been reached about the impact of these dispersion dimensions on team coordination and project outcomes. Objective This paper summarizes empirical evidence on the impact of global dispersion dimensions on coordination, team performance and project outcomes. Method We performed a systematic literature review of 46 publications from 25 journals and 19 conference and workshop proceedings, which were published between 2001 and 2013. Thematic analysis was used to identify global dimensions and their measures. Vote counting was used to decide on the impact trends of dispersion dimensions on team performance and software quality. Results Global dispersion dimensions are consistently conceptualized, but quantified in many different ways. Different dispersion dimensions are associated with a distinct set of coordination challenges. Overall, geographical dispersion tends to have a negative impact on team performance and software quality. Temporal dispersion tends to have a negative impact on software quality, but its impact on team performance is inconsistent and can be explained by type of performance. Conclusion For researchers, we reveal several opportunities for future research, such as coordination challenges in inter-organizational software projects, impact of processes and practices mismatches on project outcomes, evolution of coordination needs and mechanism over time and impact of dispersion dimensions on open source project outcomes. For practitioners, they should consider the tradeoff between cost and benefits while dispersing tasks, alignment impact of dispersion dimensions with individual and organizational objectives, coordination mechanisms as situational approaches and collocation of development activities of high quality demand components in GSD projects.

Software Startups - A Research Agenda

Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited timeframes and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startup ...

Hunter-gatherer cycle: a conceptual model of the evolution of software startups

Software startups are increasingly important in generating innovative products and services that widely impact global economy. However, there is an insufficient research support for their innovation and engineering activities, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. This study aims at proposing a conceptual model to understand how these activities occur and evolve in software startups. The model is constructed using a complexity theory and system design thinking. The model usage is illustrated by describing three software startup stories. The results show that our model can capture innovation generation activities and the non-linear evolution of engineering activities in software startups, which is not presentable in current software life cycle models.

Coordination of Software Development Teams across Organizational Boundary -- An Exploratory Study

Coordinating teams across geographical, temporal and cultural boundaries has been identified as a critical task to achieve the success of global software projects. Organizational boundary is another dimension of global distribution, which is a less visible but equally important factor that influences team coordination. This study investigates attributes of the organizational boundary that inhibits coordination and development activities. Besides, we explore a set of effective coordination practices to overcome organizational boundary. The data were collected from two projects involving four different software development organizations. We found that the variety on collaboration policy, team organization, engineering process, and development practices contributes to extra coordination efforts, insufficient communication, team awareness and mistrust. The study also highlights that coordination practices, such as face-to-face contact, process synchronization and shared collaborative development are compulsory but not sufficient for effective team coordination across organizational boundary.

Towards an Early Stage Software Startups Evolution Model

Startup process is a series of experiments before reaching a successful product. However, it is often difficult for startup founders to learn from their own experiences as well as from other startups. In order to capture the evolution of product and customer, we developed a theoretical model for early stage software startups. The model was adopted to describe five European software startups. Data was collected by interviews and documents. The model revealed the co-evolution patterns of product and customer knowledge. In addition, it discovers a common startup patterns among our cases, such as prototype-centric development and scale-up Agile. Last but not least, the model highlights signification pivots and possible relationship among them.

What Influences the Speed of Prototyping? An Empirical Investigation of Twenty Software Startups

It is essential for startups to quickly experiment business ideas by building tangible prototypes and collecting user feedback on them. As prototyping is an inevitable part of learning for early stage software startups, how fast startups can learn depends on how fast they can prototype. Despite of the importance, there is a lack of research about prototyping in software startups. In this study, we aimed at understanding what are factors influencing different types of prototyping activities. We conducted a multiple case study on twenty European software startups. The results are two folds; firstly we propose a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups. Secondly, we identify factors occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in early stage software startups. The factors are grouped into (1) artifacts, (2) team competence, (3) collaboration, (4) customer and (5) process dimensions. To speed up a startup’s progress at the early stage, it is important to incorporate the learning objective into a well-defined collaborative approach of prototyping.

On the Role of Boundary Spanners as Team Coordination Mechanisms in Organizationally Distributed Projects

Software projects are still facing with challenges of team coordination across global boundaries. Boundary spanner is an important organic coordination mechanism that is not much explored in GSD literature. This paper presents a finding from four case studies of how a boundary spanner resolve coordination gaps in organizationally distributed teams. The qualitative data were collected from 16 interviews from different types of global software projects. Boundary spanners have common characteristics of a coordinator, such as team member recognition, multiple perspective expertise, decision-making ability and work time flexibility. Task negotiation, conflict resolution, task information navigation and boundary object set-up are common activities to support team coordination. We also discussed a compound effect of other organizational roles and the impact of context factors on boundary spanners activities.

Female Leadership in Software Projects—A Preliminary Result on Leadership Style and Project Context Factors

Women have been shown to be effective leaders in many team-based situations. However, it is also well-recognized that women are underrepresented in engineering and technology areas, which leads to wasted efforts and a lack of diversity in professional organizations. Although studies about gender and leadership are rich, research focusing on engineering-specific activities, are scarce. To react on this gap, we explored the experience of female leaders of software development projects and possible context factors that influence leadership effectiveness. The study was conducted as a longitudinal multiple case study. Data was collected from survey, interviews, observation and project reports. In this work, we reported some preliminary findings related to leadership style, team perception on leadership and team-task context factors. We found a strong correlation between perceived team leadership and task management. We also observed a potential association between human-oriented leading approach in low customer involvement scenarios and task-oriented leading approach in high customer involvement situations.