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Pitfalls in Remote Team Coordination: Lessons Learned from a Case Study

  • Conference paper
Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5089))

Abstract

As companies become more and more distributed, multi-site development is becoming a norm. However along with the new opportunities, geographic distribution is proven to increase the complexity of software engineering introducing challenges for remote team communication, coordination and control. In this article we present an illustrative singe-case study with an intra-organizational intra-national context focussing on the effect of geographic distribution on team coordination practices and how this influences remote team performance. Based on our findings we conclude that a) distribution significantly influences the nature of coordination; b) remote team coordination mechanisms can’t be chosen disregarding the complexity of the given tasks and c) the distribution of work on complex software development tasks shall be avoided.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Latvia, Latvia

    Darja Šmite

  2. SINTEF, Norway

    Nils Brede Moe

  3. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

    Richard Torkar

Authors
  1. Darja Šmite
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  2. Nils Brede Moe
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  3. Richard Torkar
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Editor information

Andreas Jedlitschka Outi Salo

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Šmite, D., Moe, N.B., Torkar, R. (2008). Pitfalls in Remote Team Coordination: Lessons Learned from a Case Study. In: Jedlitschka, A., Salo, O. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5089. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69566-0_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69566-0_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69564-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69566-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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