Routine and standardization in global software development

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

We present an ethnographic field study of a distributed software development team following the Scrum methodology. During a two-week period, we observed from both sites the collaboration between a Danish software company off-shoring part of their development to an Indian solution provider. Collaboration by its very definition is based on the notion of dependency in work between multiple people. Articulation work is the extra work required to handle these dependencies. In a globally distributed team, managing these dependencies is exacerbated due to the distances of time, space, and culture. To broaden our understanding of dependencies in a global context and how they influence work practices, we made them the focus of our analysis. The main contributions of this paper are (i) an empirical account of the dependencies that are part of the collaborative work in a global software development team, (ii) a discussion of the interlinked properties of dependencies, and (iii) an explanation of how the practices of standardization and routine are developed and used to manage these dependencies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGROUP 2014 - Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
Number of pages12
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Publication date9 Nov 2014
Pages12-23
ISBN (Electronic)9781450330435
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Nov 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event18th ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP 2014 - Sanibel Island, United States
Duration: 9 Nov 201412 Nov 2014

Conference

Conference18th ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP 2014
LandUnited States
BySanibel Island
Periode09/11/201412/11/2014
SponsorACM SIGCHI, Microsoft Research
SeriesProceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2014 ACM.

    Research areas

  • Dependencies, Ethnographic study, Global software development, Routine, Standardization

ID: 285805301