Global software development and delay: Does distance still matter?

GOALS

1.Study of communication structures and delay, as well as task completion times in IBM’s
 distributed development project Jazz.
2.Exploring the effect of distance on communication and task completion time.
3.Used social network analysis to obtain insights about the collaboration in the Jazz project.
4.Findings in the light of existing literature on distributed collaboration and delays.

Paper consists of the following:
1.Challenges in distributed communication.
2.Effects of distribution on communication delay
3.Communication structures and task completion times.
4.The study settings, the data constructs and the data collection.
5.The analysis, and results are discussed.
6.Possible threats to validity are discussed.

Study settings done for the analysis of JAZZ project:

1.Its development involves 16 different sites that are located in the United States,
 Canada, and Europe.
2.Functional units->team lead->leads report to a project management committee ->
 project-wide coordination.
3.It uses the Eclipse Way process.
4.Every team has an iteration plan that consists of unstructured text and task descriptions,
which are captured in work items.
5.Commenting on the work items, chat, email are means of communication.

Communication and task completion in distributed teams:
1.Geographical distance introduces not much significant delays in communication and task
 completion.
2.Variations in communication and task completion times cannot be at all associated with
the variation in geographical distance of collaborators in the project.
3.The expectation that larger distribution, as found in collaboration involved a higher number
of sites, is associated with an increase in both response and work item resolution times,
was not confirmed in this study.

Threats to validity:
1.Sources of information  such as email lists, chat, web-based information and
face-to-face meetings were not considered.
2.Author believed that comments are most commonly used method to communicate
about work items.
3.Conceptualization of response time assumes that every comment on a work item is a
 response to the previous comment on that work item.
4.The resolution time might also include possible idle time, i.e. the time between the
 creation and the actual time when someone starts working on the task described by the
work item, which is not considered.

Lessons learned:
1.Distance does not have as strong of an effect on distributed communication delay and
task completion.
2.Asynchronously comment on and tracking activity of work items, mitigate the effect
of distance.
3.The mechanism of a shared repository and associated comments from members facilitates
 knowledge exchange and aids expertise seeking.