Article

How social software supports cooperative practices in a globally distributed software project

Authors:

Rosalba Giuffrida,

Yvonne DittrichAuthors Info & Claims

CHASE 2014: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Pages 24 - 31

https://doi.org/10.1145/2593702.2593716

Published: 02 June 2014 Publication History

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Abstract

In Global Software Development (GSD), the lack of face- to-face communication is a major challenge and effective computer-mediated practices are necessary. This paper analyzes cooperative practices supported by Social Software (SoSo) in a GSD student project. The empirical results show that the role of SoSo is to support informal communication, enabling social talks and metawork, both necessary for establishing and for maintaining effective coordination mechanisms, thus successful cooperation.

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Cited By

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Vukašinović NBenedičič JŽavbi R(2020)Evolution of Communication Skills in Virtual Product Development Process: Experience From EGPRHarnessing Knowledge, Innovation and Competence in Engineering of Mission Critical Systems10.5772/intechopen.90059Online publication date: 4-Mar-2020
https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90059
Dittrich YMichelsen CTell PLous PEbdrup ADevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)Exploring the evolution of software practicesProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3409766(493-504)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3409766
Dittrich Y(2016)What does it mean to use a method? Towards a practice theory for software engineeringInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2015.07.00170:C(220-231)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2015.07.001

Index Terms

How social software supports cooperative practices in a globally distributed software project
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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Reviews

Reviewer: James M. Perry

Software development projects utilize cooperative practices that depend on the effective coordination of individual activities. Software processes, methods, and tools support coordination, but are not sufficient. This paper shows how social protocols and informal relationships are necessary and demonstrates the role that social software (SoSo) can have in enabling global software development (GSD) shared coordination practices. Communication plays a key role in establishing and maintaining these social protocols. While face-to-face communication is a primary form of communication in co-located software development, it is lacking or greatly limited in GSD. This paper presents empirical results on the relationship of coordination mechanisms, social protocols, and communication genres, and the role of social software in enabling social protocols. The paper describes a GSD case study that used social software to provide several forms of web communication genres. These complemented the software support tools used on the project and supported the evolution of social protocols for establishing coordination practices. The authors analyzed GSD artifacts to understand the role of social software in the negotiation and institutionalization of coordination and communication mechanisms. This well-written paper describes a sound methodology for the case study, and presents an informative analysis and interesting discussion of results, limitations, and future work. The paper is of interest to GSD developers and to those interested in social software; from a broad perspective, it is applicable to any distributed cooperative activity that depends on evolving shared practices, informal relationships, socialization, and a “negotiated project culture.” Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

CHASE 2014: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

June 2014

132 pages

ISBN:9781450328609

DOI:10.1145/2593702

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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TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 02 June 2014

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ICSE '14

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SIGSOFT

ICSE '14: 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

June 2 - 3, 2014

Hyderabad, India

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Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

View all

Vukašinović NBenedičič JŽavbi R(2020)Evolution of Communication Skills in Virtual Product Development Process: Experience From EGPRHarnessing Knowledge, Innovation and Competence in Engineering of Mission Critical Systems10.5772/intechopen.90059Online publication date: 4-Mar-2020
https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90059
Dittrich YMichelsen CTell PLous PEbdrup ADevanbu PCohen MZimmermann T(2020)Exploring the evolution of software practicesProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3409766(493-504)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368089.3409766
Dittrich Y(2016)What does it mean to use a method? Towards a practice theory for software engineeringInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2015.07.00170:C(220-231)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2015.07.001

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A conceptual framework to study the role of communication through social software for coordination in globally-distributed software teams

Systematic literature review on agile practices in global software development

Using scrum in a globally distributed project: a case study

Reviews

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here