Abstract
Geographic separation, lack of timezone overlap, and cultural differences are widely recognized as factors that impede communication and collaboration of globally distributed software development teams.
While much research has been done into how these factors affect communication and collaboration, there needs to be a way of measuring how much effect they have. This research develops a Global Distance Metric that attempts to quantify global distance as the combination of three factors: geographic, temporal, and cultural distance. Thirty researchers and practitioners were asked to rate the degree to which distance factors affect collaboration. The responses were aggregated and used to calibrate a global distance metric.
The metric revealed some surprising insights into the perception of global distance among the teams. In particular, pairs of teams had different perceptions of the cultural distance with their peers, with native English speakers perceiving a lower value than non-native speakers.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the ICGSE 2014 attendees, and practitioners who participated in the global software development workshop, who completed our survey.
This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grants 10/CE/I1855 and 13/RC/2094 to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie).
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Survey: Measuring Global Distance
Survey: Measuring Global Distance
John Noll (john.noll@leroie), Sarah Beecham (sarah.beecham@lero.ie)
Geographic separation, lack of working day overlap, and cultural differences affect how well teams at different locations collaborate on a software development project. Taken together, we call these factors “Global Distance”, which comprises three components: geographic distance (separation between sites), temporal distance (difference in timezones between sites), and cultural distance (difference in national, regional, and organizational culture between sites).
This survey has two objectives: 1. to assess the degree to which different factors increase Global Distance, and 2. to assess how different interventions reduce or mitigate Global Distance.
Please circle the number that best answers the question.
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Noll, J., Beecham, S. (2016). Measuring Global Distance: A Survey of Distance Factors and Interventions. In: Clarke, P., O'Connor, R., Rout, T., Dorling, A. (eds) Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination. SPICE 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 609. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38980-6_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38980-6_17
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