Cultural Influences on Collaborative Work in Software Engineering Teams

International business activities increasingly lead to the formation of multicultural teams that work together as project teams, for a certain time both at a site as well as in virtual teams. Despite the modern conception of many companies that multicultural composite teams are more productive due to various perspectives and work styles, the ignorance and disrespect of these differences in work styles and perspectives can lead to misunderstanding and loss of productivity. In this paper, we report our findings from a systematic literature review that analyzes previous research on cross-cultural software engineering, to identify potential impacts of national cultural factors on collaborative approaches and behavior in software engineering teams. We discuss the current emerging state of knowledge and point out directions for advancing the understanding of cultural influences in this domain to lay the foundation for better collaboration design for cross-cultural software engineering teams

Collaboration among Crowdsourcees: Towards a Design Theory for Collaboration Process Design

Crowdsourcing is used for collaborative problem solving in different domains. The key to optimal solutions is mostly found by collaboration among the crowdsourcees. The current state of research on this field addresses this topic mainly with an explorative focus on a specific domain, such as idea contests. We gather and analyze the contributions from the different domains on collaboration in crowdsourcing. We present a framework for a general collaboration process model for crowdsourcing. To derive this framework, we conducted a literature review and set up a database, which assigns the literature to the process steps that we identified from interaction patterns in the literature. The framework considers phases before and after the collaboration among crowdsourcees and includes relevant activities that can influence the collaboration process. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the interaction among crowdsourcees and provides crowdsourcers with grounding for the informed design of effective collaborative crowdsourcing processes.

Systematic and Continuous Business Model Development: Design of a Repeatable Process Using the Collaboration Engineering Approach

Due to permanent changes, companies constantly need to contend with new challenges. Developing and improving business models can help to adapt to constantly changing environmental conditions and to achieve competitiveness. Because most innovative developments are not the result of a single inventor, we used Collaboration Engineering to elaborate a systematic process design for business model development. To ensure an effective process design, we turned to existing knowledge by including theoretical and practical requirements of business model development. Additionally, in order to guarantee the high quality of the process, we evaluated the systematic process on the basis of a multilevel and iterative evaluation. Our evaluation clearly indicates results equivalent to expert-based business model development. Accordingly, the process design enables a continuous and recurring business model development without the ongoing support of professional facilitators

Why Shared Understanding Matters -Engineering a Collaboration Process for Shared Understanding to Improve Collaboration Effectiveness in Heterogeneous Teams

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