John Noll

Global software development and collaboration: barriers and solutions

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.

Crafting a Global Teaming Model for Architectural Knowledge

In this paper, we present the Global Teaming Model (GTM), which is empirically grounded, and outlines practices that managers need to consider when managing virtual teams. We explain how the model can be adapted to specific areas of software development, and use architectural knowledge management (AKM) as our exemplar. We focus on specific practices relating to how teams collaborate and share essential architectural knowledge across multiple sites. Through a review of the literature, we develop an in-depth view of recommended practices associated with AKM in a global environment. We then consider how we can incorporate these AKM practices into our Global Teaming model to ensure managers are given the necessary support. Our contribution to research therefore is to present AKM practices within the context of all other Global Software Development processes.

Making Software Engineering Research Relevant

Practitioners perceive research on global software engineering as useful, yet they rarely read academic articles on the topic. Instead, they look to books, blogs, colleagues, forums, and their own experiences for solutions. Making research more relevant to practice requires a new mindset.

A Qualitative Study of Open Source Software Development: The Open EMR Project

Open Source software is competing successfully in many areas. The commercial sector is recognizing the benefits offered by Open Source development methods that lead to high quality software. Can these benefits be realized in specialized domains where expertise is rare? This study examined discussion forums of an Open Source project in a particular specialized application domain -- electronic medical records -- to see how development roles are carried out, and by whom. We found through a qualitative analysis that the core developers in this system include doctors and clinicians who also use the product. We also found that the size of the community associated with the project is an order of magnitude smaller than predicted, yet still maintains a high degree of responsiveness to issues raised by users. The implication is that a few experts and a small core of dedicated programmers can achieve success using an Open Source approach in a specialized domain.

A Decision Support System for Global Team Management: Expert Evaluation

Context: The literature is rich in examples of both successful and failed global software development projects. However, practitioners do not have the time to wade through the many recommendations to work out which ones apply to them. To this end, we developed a prototype Decision Support System (DSS) for Global Teaming (GT), with the goal of making research results available to practitioners. Aims: We want the system we build to be based on the real needs of practitioners: the end users of our system. Therefore the aim of this study is to assess the usefulness and usability of our proof-of-concept in order to create a tool that is actually used by practitioners. Method: Twelve experts in GSD evaluated our system. Each individual participant tested the system and completed a short usability questionnaire. Results: Feedback on the prototype DSS was positive. All experts supported the concept, although many suggested areas that could be improved. Both expert practitioners and researchers participated, providing different perspectives on what we need to do to improve the system. Conclusion: Involving both practitioners (users) and researchers in the evaluation elicited a range of useful feedback, providing useful insights that might not have emerged had we focused on one or the other group. However, even when we implement recommended changes, we still need to persuade practitioner to adopt the new tool.

What Motivates Software Engineers Working in Global Software Development

Context: Working in a distributed environment poses new challenges to software engineer motivation. Problem: Where should global project managers focus their efforts so that they have the best chance of motivating their teams, for higher staff retention, increased productivity and improved software quality? Method: We asked a group of software engineers attending a workshop on global collaboration to complete a survey on software engineer motivation. We then identified motivation themes in the responses. Finally, we mapped these themes to software engineer motivators identified in previous research. Results: Thirteen participants completed the survey. Analysis of the results yielded 27 motivation categories. The vast majority 23 of 27 were partially or wholly mapped to Intrinsic motivators. Implications: We conclude that Global Software Development projects that relegate some teams to performing routine tasks such as maintenance or testing will experience lower productivity and quality due to demotivation. Finally, we hypothesize that GSD introduces new motivators, such as opportunities to travel and interact with different cultures.

Survivability Models for Global Software Engineering

Software projects that are engineered using global software development techniques are required to deploy processes and tools to support collaboration over large geographies. Specifically, these projects involve the deployment of processes and tools to support project management, communication, and risk management. Whereas a traditional software development effort can use standard processes and tools to support communication and collaboration, global software development efforts require a unified and holistic project management, development process, collaboration, and communication approach taking into consideration the interplay of time zones, number of sites and cultural diversity. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for modeling and quantification of global software engineering frameworks. In our approach, we apply transient survivability metrics to support the design of global software engineering projects. Therefore, our approach combines survivability analysis and global software engineering frameworks analysis. The survivability metric used in this paper is the time required to recover from a software project disaster (e.g., break down in communication between remote teams) for a given global software engineering framework. The global software engineering modeling framework we use is composed of models supporting the evaluation of communication tools, software development processes and cultural diversity management. We illustrate the application of our approach by applying it to the analysis of an example derived from a real global software engineering project. Our results indicate that the combination of survivability analysis and modeling of global software engineering frameworks can provide meaningful insights when designing global software engineering frameworks.

Preparing Tomorrow's Software Engineers for Work in a Global Environment

Global software engineering (GSE) is becoming common. Its thus important to educate university software engineering students in GSE. The authors discuss challenges to and recommendations for implementing such instruction.

Simulating Global Software Development Processes for Use in Education: A Feasibility Study

VENTURE is a simulation-based training platform aimed at helping practitioners overcome process problems that arise in Global Software Development (GSD). VENTURE places practitioners in simulated GSD scenarios in which they play a role and interact with Virtual Agents, who represent team members from different nationalities. VENTURE makes it possible to simulate cultural, linguistic and GSD procedural problems gathered from experience and empirical studies. This paper reports on a Feasibility Study aimed to determine the potential of VENTURE to: 1) simulate GSD scenarios and processes of potential conflict, and 2) train practitioners to cope with these conflicts by interacting with virtual agents. A group of researchers and experts studied the platform and, through a survey-based method, they provided their endorsement of the concept. We received positive feedback and encouragement, in that the simulation of GSD processes will effectively provide training in industrial settings, helping practitioners to identify and resolve predefined problems.

A Feature Model of Actor, Agent, Functional, Object, and Procedural Programming Languages

Abstract The number of programming languages is large and steadily increasing. However, little structured information and empirical evidence is available to help software engineers assess the suitability of a language for a particular development project or software architecture. We argue that these shortages are partly due to a lack of high-level, objective programming language feature assessment criteria: existing advice to practitioners is often based on ill-defined notions of ‘paradigms’ [3, p. xiii] and ‘orientation’, while researchers lack a shared common basis for generalisation and synthesis of empirical results. This paper presents a feature model constructed from the programmers perspective, which can be used to precisely compare general-purpose programming languages in the actor-oriented, agent-oriented, functional, object-oriented, and procedural categories. The feature model is derived from the existing literature on general concepts of programming, and validated with concrete mappings of well-known languages in each of these categories. The model is intended to act as a tool for both practitioners and researchers, to facilitate both further high-level comparative studies of programming languages, and detailed investigations of feature usage and efficacy in specific development contexts.