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"Figure out how to code with the hands of others": recognizing cultural blind spots in global software development

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We report on an ethnographic study of an outsourcing global software development (GSD) setup between an Indian IT vendor and an IT development division of a Danish bank. We investigate how the local IT development work is shaped by the global setup in GSD and argue that the bank had cultural blind spots toward the changes in Denmark. Three critical issues were neglected due to the cultural blind spots: 1) increased number of interruptions, 2) lack of translucence of remote colleagues' work, and 3) the re-definition of boundaries between work and articulation work. The implications of these findings include considerations for how to organize GSD practices and prepare the organizational changes that occur when moving from a co-located software development organization to an inter-organizational geographically distributed organization. Also, our findings open up discussions about the professional identity of IT developers within GSD, including extending the qualifications for IT developers.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
      February 2014
      1600 pages
      ISBN:9781450325400
      DOI:10.1145/2531602
      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: 15 February 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. articulation work
      2. cultural blind spots
      3. ethnographic study
      4. global software development (gsd)
      5. local work practices

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      CSCW'14: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
      February 15 - 19, 2014
      Maryland, Baltimore, USA

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      CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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