Coping with distance: An empirical study of communication on the Jazz platform

Global software development - which is characterized by teams separated by physical distance and/or time-zone differences - has traditionally posed significant communication challenges. Often these have caused delays in completing tasks, or created misalignment across sites leading to re-work. In recent years, however, a new breed of development environments with rich collaboration features have emerged to facilitate cross-site work in distributed projects. In this paper we revisit the question "does distance matter?" in the context of IBM Jazz Platform - a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment. We study the ecosystem of a large distributed team of around 300 members across 35 physical locations, which uses the Jazz platform for agile development. Our results indicate that while there is a delay in communication due to geographic separation, teams try to reduce the impact of delays by having a large percentage of work distributed within same/few time zones and working beyond regular office hours to interact with distributed teams. We observe different communication patterns depending on the roles of the team members, with component leads and project managers having a significantly higher overhead than development team members. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in terms of some best practices that can help lessen the impact of distance.</p

Toward a Framework for Localisation of Product Software across Organisational Boundaries

Distributed agile development (DAD) is a current trend for software development. It uses agile practices to promote iteration and flexibility in the distributed development of software projects. DAD involves a software vendor and their customers working together, leading to an overlap between their organisations. In this report, which is a progress report submitted for continuation towards a PhD, we introduce the agile software development and propose a framework for the localisation of software products across organisational and cultural boundaries. The framework addresses and accommodates the key components of the area between software vendors and customers. Our approach is useful in that it helps project managers, stakeholders and developers to understand the correlations and critical factors associated with customers and software vendors. This framework tries to cover all the important aspects of the development of agile software across distributed organisational cultures instead of focusing on a specific aspect such as project management

A technical perspective of knowledge management in collaborative software maintenance environment

Knowledge management (KM) is critical in Software Maintenance (SM) organizations to provide an environment for creating and sharing knowledge.SM environment is complex, knowledge-driven and highly collaborative.Issue such as inadequate knowledge is still regarded as a major challenge in SM.To find out more on the above limitation in term of technical perspective, we study the activities of a maintenance organization and conducted a survey and discussion.Based on the results, we conclude that domain and technical knowledge are important to maintainers, but are often not available. Also,usefulness of tools to acquire and share knowledge are limited, mainly due to lack of integration between tools