skip to main content
10.1145/2660398.2660413acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesgroupConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Routine and Standardization in Global Software Development

Published: 09 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We present an ethnographic field study of a distributed software development team following the Scrum methodology. During a two-week period, we observed from both sites the collaboration between a Danish software company off-shoring part of their development to an Indian solution provider. Collaboration by its very definition is based on the notion of dependency in work between multiple people. Articulation work is the extra work required to handle these dependencies. In a globally distributed team, managing these dependencies is exacerbated due to the distances of time, space, and culture. To broaden our understanding of dependencies in a global context and how they influence work practices, we made them the focus of our analysis. The main contributions of this paper are (i) an empirical account of the dependencies that are part of the collaborative work in a global software development team, (ii) a discussion of the interlinked properties of dependencies, and (iii) an explanation of how the practices of standardization and routine are developed and used to manage these dependencies.

References

[1]
P. Bjørn and E. Balka. Health care categories have politics too: Unpacking the managerial agendas of electronic triage systems. In ECSCW 2007, pages 371--390. Springer London, 2007.
[2]
P. Bjørn and L. R. Christensen. Relation work: Creating socio-technical connections in global engineering. In ECSCW 2011: Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 24--28 September 2011, Aarhus Denmark, pages 133--152. Springer London, 2011.
[3]
A. Boden, G. Avram, L. Bannon, and V. Wulf. Knowledge management in distributed software development teams - does culture matter? In Global Software Engineering, 2009. ICGSE 2009. Fourth IEEE International Conference on, pages 18--27, July 2009.
[4]
A. Boden, B. Nett, and V. Wulf. Articulation work in small-scale offshore software development projects. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, CHASE '08, pages 21--24, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.
[5]
A. Boden, F. Rosswog, G. Stevens, and V. Wulf. Articulation spaces: Bridging the gap between formal and informal coordination. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, CSCW '14, pages 1120--1130, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.
[6]
G. C. Bowker and S. L. Star. Sorting things out : classification and its consequences. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999.
[7]
M. Cataldo, M. Bass, J. Herbsleb, and L. Bass. On coordination mechanisms in global software development. In Global Software Engineering, 2007. ICGSE 2007. Second IEEE International Conference on, pages 71--80, Aug 2007.
[8]
L. R. Christensen and P. Bjørn. Documentscape: Intertextuality, sequentiality & autonomy at work. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '14, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.
[9]
L. R. Christensen, R. E. Jensen, and P. Bjørn. Creating relation work: Characteristics for local and gloval collaboration. COOP '14. Springer, 2014.
[10]
C. de Souza and D. Redmiles. The awareness network, to whom should i display my actions? and, whose actions should i monitor? Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 37(3):325--340, May 2011.
[11]
C. R. de Souza, S. Quirk, E. Trainer, and D. F. Redmiles. Supporting collaborative software development through the visualization of socio-technical dependencies. In Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work, pages 147--156. ACM, 2007.
[12]
K. M. Eisenhardt. Building theories from case study research. The Academy of Management Review, 14(4):pp. 532--550, 1989.
[13]
G. Ellingsen, E. Monteiro, and G. Munkvold. Standardization of work: Co-constructed practice. The Information Society, 23(5):309--326, Oct. 2007.
[14]
M. S. Feldman and W. J. Orlikowski. Theorizing practice and practicing theory. Organization Science, 22(5):1240--1253, 2011.
[15]
M. S. Feldman and A. Rafaeli. Organizational routines as sources of connections and understandings. Journal of Management Studies, 39(3):309--331, 2002.
[16]
E. Gerson. Reach, bracket, and the limits of rationalized coordination: Some challenges for cscw. In Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pages 193--220. Springer London, 2008.
[17]
B. G. Glaser and A. L. Strauss. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine de Gruyter, New York, NY, 1967.
[18]
R. Grinter. Recomposition: Coordinating a web of software dependencies. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 12(3):297--327, 2003.
[19]
J. D. Herbsleb, A. Mockus, T. A. Finholt, and R. E. Grinter. Distance, dependencies, and delay in a global collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW '00, pages 319--328, New York, NY, USA, 2000. ACM.
[20]
M. Hertzum and J. Pries-Heje. Is Minimizing Interaction a Solution to Cultural and Maturity Inequality in Offshore Outsourcing?, pages 77--97. TAPIR Akademisk Forlag, 2011. 2011; 4.
[21]
N. Holten Møller and P. Dourish. Coordination by avoidance: Bringing things together and keeping them apart across hospital departments. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP '10, pages 65--74, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
[22]
R. E. Jensen and P. Bjørn. Divergence and convergence in global software development: Cultural complexities as social worlds. In From Research to Practice in the Design of Cooperative Systems: Results and Open Challenges, pages 123--136. Springer London, 2012.
[23]
P. Luff and e. al. Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practices and Informing System Design. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
[24]
T. W. Malone and K. Crowston. The interdisciplinary study of coordination. ACM Comput. Surv., 26(1):87--119, Mar. 1994.
[25]
S. Matthiessen, P. Bjørn, and L. M. Petersen. "figuring out how to code with the hands of others": Recognizing cultural blind spots in global software development. In Proceedings The 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW '14, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.
[26]
T. Meum, E. Monteiro, and G. Ellingsen. The pendulum of standardization. In ECSCW 2011: Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 24--28 September 2011, Aarhus Denmark, pages 101--120. Springer London, 2011.
[27]
R. Prikladnicki, A. Boden, G. Avram, C. Souza, and V. Wulf. Data collection in global software engineering research: learning from past experience. Empirical Software Engineering, pages 1--35, 2013.
[28]
K. Schmidt and L. Bannon. Taking cscw seriously. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1(1--2):7--40, 1992.
[29]
K. Schmidt and C. Simone. Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of cscw systems design. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 5(2--3):155--200, 1996.
[30]
K. Schwaber and J. Sutherland. The scrum guide: The definitive guide to scrum: The rules of the game, 2011.
[31]
A.-M. Søderberg, S. Krishna, and P. Bjørn. Global software development: Commitment, trust and cultural sensitivity in strategic partnerships. Journal of International Management, 19(4):347--361, 2013. Developing Offshoring Capabilities for the Contemporary Offshoring Organization.
[32]
A. Strauss. The articulation of project work: An organizational process. Sociological Quarterly, 29(2):163--178, 1988.
[33]
L. Suchman. Do categories have politics? the language/action perspective reconsidered. In Proceedings of the Third Conference on European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, ECSCW'93, pages 1--14, Norwell, MA, USA, 1993. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[34]
L. A. Suchman. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA, 1987.
[35]
G. Walsham. Icts and global working in a non-flat world. In Information Technology in the Service Economy: Challenges and Possibilities for the 21st Century, volume 267, pages 13--25. Springer US, 2008.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Achieving Symmetry in Synchronous Interaction in Hybrid Work is ImpossibleACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/364861731:4(1-34)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Meeting Bridges: Designing Information Artifacts that Bridge from Synchronous Meetings to Asynchronous CollaborationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373128:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Implicit bias and negative stereotyping in global software development and why it is time to move on!Journal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.243535:5Online publication date: 25-Apr-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
GROUP '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
November 2014
340 pages
ISBN:9781450330435
DOI:10.1145/2660398
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 the author(s) 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].

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 November 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. dependencies
  2. ethnographic study
  3. global software development
  4. routine
  5. standardization

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

Conference

GROUP '14
Sponsor:
GROUP '14: 2014 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork
November 9 - 12, 2014
Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

Acceptance Rates

GROUP '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 27 of 90 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 125 of 405 submissions, 31%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)22
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Achieving Symmetry in Synchronous Interaction in Hybrid Work is ImpossibleACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/364861731:4(1-34)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Meeting Bridges: Designing Information Artifacts that Bridge from Synchronous Meetings to Asynchronous CollaborationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373128:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Implicit bias and negative stereotyping in global software development and why it is time to move on!Journal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.243535:5Online publication date: 25-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Group Effect Aspects in Digitalisation Production ContextsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35675607:GROUP(1-28)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Collaboration, Invisible Work, and The Costs of Macrotask FreelancingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35551756:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Work of the FutureAdjunct Proceedings of the 2022 Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3547522.3547707(1-4)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Work Systems in the Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry Delivering Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions and the Challenges of Work from HomeInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-022-10259-425:4(1375-1399)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Utility Evaluation of Software Product: An Industry ImplementationAdvanced Research in Technologies, Information, Innovation and Sustainability10.1007/978-3-030-90241-4_9(106-117)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
  • (2021)A fuzzy analytical hierarchy process to prioritize the success factors of requirement change management in global software developmentJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.229233:2Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
  • (2020)Challenges and barriers in virtual teams: a literature reviewSN Applied Sciences10.1007/s42452-020-2801-52:6Online publication date: 20-May-2020
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media