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Bridging cultural differences: a grounded theory perspective

Published: 24 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Cultural differences often arise in distributed software development. The impact of cultural differences on distributed teams is under-explored. The lack of knowledge of cultural differences can cause major problems to the distributed teams. We have conducted a Grounded Theory study to uncover the strategies adopted by Agile practitioners to overcome the cultural differences in distributed software development. We interviewed 18 Agile practitioners across 10 software companies in the USA and India over a period of 1.5 years. In this paper, we report that our participants adopt five effective strategies to bridge cultural differences in distributed Agile software development: engendering cultural awareness, understanding cultural differences, sharing work practices, rotating team ambassadors, and managing language barriers.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ISEC '11: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
February 2011
229 pages
ISBN:9781450305594
DOI:10.1145/1953355
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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Publication History

Published: 24 February 2011

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Author Tags

  1. cultural differences
  2. distributed agile software development
  3. grounded theory

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  • Research-article

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ISEC '11
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  • Computer Society of India
ISEC '11: Indian Software Engineering Conference
February 24 - 27, 2011
Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India

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  • (2024)Design for Sustainability: Exploring Cultural Attributes in an Indian Village for Nature Connectedness—A Grounded Theory Approach2024 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS)10.1109/ISTAS61960.2024.10732817(1-8)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2024
  • (2021)Toward Unveiling How SAFe Framework Supports Agile in Global Software DevelopmentIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.31019639(109671-109692)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2020)Agile Global Software DevelopmentProceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3422392.3422411(31-40)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2020
  • (2018)A Survey on the Impact of Risk Factors and Mitigation Strategies in Global Software DevelopmentTrends and Advances in Information Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-319-77712-2_39(408-417)Online publication date: 17-May-2018
  • (2018)Global Software Development: Practices for Cultural DifferencesProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_22(299-317)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2018
  • (2017)Identifying and mitigating risks of software project management in global software developmentProceedings of the 27th International Workshop on Software Measurement and 12th International Conference on Software Process and Product Measurement10.1145/3143434.3143453(12-22)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2017
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  • (2016)Beyond the BorderProceedings of the 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)10.1109/HICSS.2016.612(4932-4941)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2016
  • (2015)Scaling a running agile fix-bid project with near shoring: Theory vs. reality and (best) practice2015 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)10.1109/ICSTW.2015.7107421(1-7)Online publication date: Apr-2015
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