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The design thinking of co-located vs. distributed software developers: distance strikes again!

Published: 25 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Context: Designing software is an activity in which software developers think and make design decisions that ultimately shape the structure and behavior of software products. Currently, designing software is one of the least understood activities in which software developers engage. In a collaborative design setting, distances such as geographic, cultural, or social distance can lead to socio-technical challenges that potentially affect the way software is designed.
Objective: To contribute to an increased understanding of software design, we investigate how geographic distance affects collaborative software design.
Method: To this end, we conducted a multiple-case study exploring in depth the design thinking of co-located and distributed software developers in a collaborative design setting.
Results: We find that, compared to co-located developers, distributed developers practice less problem space exploration and focus instead more on the solution space. This could be related to different socio-technical challenges caused by distributed collaboration, such as lack of awareness and common understanding.
Conclusion: Our findings contribute to an increased understanding as to how software design is affected by geographic distance. Developers engaging in collaborative design need to be aware that problem space exploration is reduced in a distributed setting, which would adversely affect the development achievement and therefore customer satisfaction.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICGSE '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Global Software Engineering
June 2020
147 pages
ISBN:9781450370936
DOI:10.1145/3372787
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].

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Published: 25 September 2020

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Author Tags

  1. CSCW
  2. cognitive aspects
  3. collaborative design thinking
  4. distance
  5. empirical study
  6. software engineering

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  • (2023)Team Creativity in a Hybrid Software Development World: Eight ApproachesIEEE Software10.1109/MS.2022.322935340:2(60-69)Online publication date: Mar-2023
  • (2023)COMET: A ML-Based Tool for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Software Design Communication2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)10.1109/MODELS-C59198.2023.00119(729-736)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
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