New Forms of Work in the Light of Globalization in Software Development

Abstract

Globalization in software development introduced significant changes in the way organizations operate today. Software is now produced by team members from geographically, temporally and culturally remote sites. Organizations seek benefits that global markets offer and face new challenges. Naturally resistant to change, these organizations often do not realize the necessity for tailoring existing methods for distributed collaboration. Our empirical investigation shows a great variety in the ways organizations distribute responsibilities across remote sites and conclude that these can be divided into two main categories: joint collaboration that requires investments in team building and independent collaboration that requires investments in knowledge management and transfer. Finally, we discuss practices that are applied in industry to overcome these challenges and emphasize necessity to fully understand the pros and cons of different ways to organize distributed software projects before starting a project in this new environment.