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Articulation work in small-scale offshore software development projects

Published: 13 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The paper describes coordination practices of small and medium enterprises (SME) that outsourced parts of their software development to offshore vendors. Our case study in a German company shows that the geographic distribution of knowledge and expertise requires continuous informal coordination across the teams. Such practices can be described as a combination of formal coordination and informal articulation work in the sense of Anselm Strauss' theoretical framework. Both are closely interwoven and connected to the use of media such as coordination tools and instant messengers. We conclude that SME risk losing their core competencies when neglecting articulation work and hint at mismatches between scientific recommendations and actual development practices of SME.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHASE '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering
    May 2008
    120 pages
    ISBN:9781605580395
    DOI:10.1145/1370114
    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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    Published: 13 May 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. CSCW
    2. SME
    3. articulation work
    4. coordination
    5. ethnography
    6. nearshoring
    7. offshoring

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    CHASE '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 34 submissions, 82%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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    • (2023)Organizing Oceanographic Infrastructure: The Work of Making a Software Pipeline RepurposableProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35795127:CSCW1(1-18)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
    • (2017)Organizing Practice and Practicing Organization: An Outline of Translational Mobilization TheorySage Open10.1177/21582440177079937:2Online publication date: 2-Jun-2017
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    • (2010)A Structured Framework for Managing Offshore Outsourcing Risks on Software Support ProjectsSoftware Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development10.1007/978-3-642-13784-6_10(87-95)Online publication date: 2010
    • (2009)Knowledge Management in Distributed Software Development Teams - Does Culture Matter?Proceedings of the 2009 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering10.1109/ICGSE.2009.10(18-27)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2009
    • (2009)Bridging knowledge distribution - The role of knowledge brokers in distributed software development teamsProceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects on Software Engineering10.1109/CHASE.2009.5071402(8-11)Online publication date: 17-May-2009
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