Leader delegation in global software teams: occurrence and effects

Global teams are an important work structure in software development projects. Managing such complex global software projects presents many challenges to traditional leadership wisdom, in particular, how, why and when the leaders should delegate responsibility and authority. Delegation is considered an important leadership component to motivate and grow subordinates. Cultural differences, skill level disparity and potential competition between different software development sites creates a management context which is much different from where traditional leadership theories were developed. This study investigates leader delegation behaviors in global software teams and explores the reasons and impact of delegation strategies on global team performance. Semi-structured interviews and a survey was used to collect data from global software team managers and members from four countries of a Fortune 100 IT service company. The results of this study include in-depth analysis of hows and whys of leader delegation in global teams and a theoretical model for analyzing global team leader delegation occurrence and effects.     

Virtual environments for work, study and leisure

Virtual environments have the potential of adding a new dimension to the concept of a community. In this paper, we describe our work on a text-based virtual environment. Although our focus is on work applications, the environment is equally suited for educational and recreational uses. The paper is presented in the context of the needs of a software development team but can be applied to other work teams as well. Two essential characteristics of successful work teams are good communication and efficient access to project information. Maintaining both of these becomes more and more difficult as the size of the team grows, and gets very difficult when the team is geographically dispersed. We describe a project that could be used to test the hypothesis that a collaborative environment using text-based virtual reality would alleviate these problems by relieving physical separation through virtual proximity. In the first phase of the project, we adapted and extended Jersey, a Smalltalk-based MOO (Multi-user domain Object Oriented) with collaborative virtual environment (CVE) features. On the basis of our experience, we then started designing and implementing MUM, a Multi-Universe MOO. When completed, the more extendable and customisable MUM will provide novel features and encourage developer experimentation. We describe some of MUM's features and our plans for it.     

Designing e-Coordinator for improved teams collaboration in graduation projects

The work presented in this paper describes the design for Graduation Project eCoordination System in our department. The proposed eCoordinator provides effective team–team, supervisor–team and coordinator–supervisors–teams collaboration. eCoordinator is an attribute based framework that serves evolving an object oriented software system into agent oriented software system. Nowadays, agent-oriented software development technologies have evolved rapidly; it is emerging as a new paradigm for constructing intelligent more autonomous software systems. Therefore, several methodologies are available and it is difficult to determine the most appropriate methodology for specific project within different domains. This is especially occurs when re-engineering current object oriented software system. The case study is going to be rebuilding a virtual graduation project coordinator in Information Technology Department at King Saud University.     

Linking perceived external prestige and collective identification to collaborative behaviors in R&D teams

Research efforts have long been directed at understanding variations in collaborative behaviors among work teams with burgeoning interest in teams operating in knowledge-intensive settings. One of the largely unexplained issues is how does team image and collective identification facilitate collaborative behaviors. Here, survey data were collected from nineteen highly technical work teams engaging in software development in an R&D division of a multinational NASDAQ firm involved in multimedia communications and information processing technology. The relationships between perceived external prestige, collective team identification and team collaborative behaviors were examined. The results of the team-level analyses suggest that perceived external prestige augments collective team identification (measured at Time 1), which in turn engenders a high degree of collaboration and interaction within the team (measured at Time 2). When past team performance was controlled for, the results consistently supported the hypothesized model.     

Group development in virtual teams: An experimental reexamination

Virtual teams are thought to be experienced differently and to have poor outcomes because there is little or no face-to-face interaction and a tendency for virtual team members to use different communication techniques for forming relationships. However, the expanding use of virtual teams in organizations suggests that virtual teams in real world contexts are able to overcome these barriers and be experienced in much the same way as face-to-face teams. This paper reports the result of an experiment in which virtual teams participated in an exercise where they completed an information-sharing task ten times as a team. The results suggest that, contrary to one-shot, ad hoc virtual teams, longer-lived virtual teams follow a sequential group development process. Virtual team development appears to differ from face-to-face teams because the use of computer-mediated communication heightens pressure to conform when a virtual team is first formed, meaning trust is most strongly linked with feeling that the team was accomplishing the task appropriately. As the virtual teams developed, trust in peers was more strongly linked with goal commitment. Once the teams were working together effectively, accomplishing the task appropriately was the strongest link with trust in peers. I suggest that virtual team managers should cultivate virtual workspaces that are similar to those proven to work in face-to-face contexts: (1) teams should have clear, specific goals, (2) members should be encouraged or even required to communicate with each other, and (3) team members should feel that they might work with the other team members again.     

Self-organization of teams for free/libre open source software development

This paper provides empirical evidence about how free/libre open source software development teams self-organize their work, specifically, how tasks are assigned to project team members. Following a case study methodology, we examined developer interaction data from three active and successful FLOSS projects using qualitative research methods, specifically inductive content analysis, to identify the task-assignment mechanisms used by the participants. We found that ‘self-assignment’ was the most common mechanism across three FLOSS projects. This mechanism is consistent with expectations for distributed and largely volunteer teams. We conclude by discussing whether these emergent practices can be usefully transferred to mainstream practice and indicating directions for future research.     

Creativity in virtual teams: Systematic review,synthesis and research agenda

Virtual teams are gaining increasing momentum in contemporary organizations. Although it is becoming clear that virtual teams will play a major role in shaping the future of work, we still know relatively little about their creative performance. Because of the disproportionate focus on conventional, face-to-face working practices, much of the literature remains centred around co-located teams. In this review, we integrate existing research on team creativity and virtual work to identify the relevant factors, processes and contextual conditions that have been shown to influence creativity in virtual teams. We highlight the major challenges that are likely to impede team creativity and assess their relevance to contemporary virtual work practices. We conclude by presenting promising avenues for future research in this area.     

Factors that motivate software engineering teams: A four country empirical study

Motivation, although difficult to quantify, is considered to be the single largest factor in developer productivity; there are also suggestions that low motivation is an important factor in software development project failure. We investigate factors that motivate software engineering teams using survey data collected from software engineering practitioners based in Australia, Chile, USA and Vietnam. We also investigate the relationship between team motivation and project outcome, identifying whether the country in which software engineering practitioners are based affects this relationship. Analysis of 333 questionnaires indicates that failed projects are associated with low team motivation. We found a set of six common team motivational factors that appear to be culturally independent (project manager has good communication with project staff, project risks reassessed, controlled and managed during the project, customer has confidence in the project manager and the development team, the working environment is good, the team works well together, and the software engineer had a pleasant experience). We also found unique groupings of team motivational factors for each of the countries investigated. This indicates that there are cultural differences that project managers need to consider when working in a global environment.     

Impact of heterogeneity and collaborative conflict management style on the performance of synchronous global virtual teams

Virtual teams cut across organizational cultures, national cultures, and functional areas, thereby increasing group heterogeneity, which may result in increased conflict among team members and less effective performance of the team. Our study explored the relationships that might exist among the heterogeneity of the virtual teams, their collaborative conflict management style, and their performance outcomes. The paper reports the findings of a laboratory experiment in which homogeneous and heterogeneous virtual teams, consisting of subjects from the USA and India, worked independently on a decision task involving the adoption of a computer use fee by an online university. Team members, used a web-based group decision support system (GDSS) that allowed them the opportunity to discuss task options, critique suggestions, and vote on the result. The data analyses suggested that collaborative conflict management style positively impacted satisfaction with the decision making process, perceived decision quality, and perceived participation of the virtual teams. There was weak evidence that links a group’s heterogeneity to its collaborative conflict management styles.     

Understanding technology use in global virtual teams: Research methodologies and methods

Context

The globalisation of activities associated with software development and use has introduced many challenges in practice, and also (therefore) many for research. While the predominant approach to research in software engineering has followed a positivist science model, this approach may be sub-optimal when addressing problems with a dominant social or cultural dimension, such as those frequently encountered when studying work practices in a globally distributed team setting.The investigation of such a team reported in this paper provides one example of an alternative approach to research in a global context, through a longitudinal interpretive field study seeking to understand how global virtual teams mediated the use of technology. The study involved a large collective of faculty and support staff plus student members based in the geographically and temporally distant locations of New Zealand, the United States of America and Sweden.

Objective

Our focus in this paper is on the conduct of research in the context of global software activities, and in particular, as applied to the actions and interactions of global virtual teams. We consider the appropriateness of various methodologies and methods in enabling such issues to be addressed.

Method

We describe how we undertook a substantial field study of global virtual teams, and highlight how the adopted structuration theory, action research and grounded theory methodologies applied to the analysis of email data, enabled us to deliver effectively against our goals.

Results

We believe that the approach taken suited a research context in which situated practices were occurring over time in a highly complex domain, ensuring that our results were both strongly grounded and relevant to practice. It has resulted in the generation of substantive theory and techniques that have been adapted and applied on a pilot basis in further field settings.

Conclusion

We conclude that globally distributed teamwork presents a complex context which demands new research approaches, beyond the limited set customarily applied by software engineering researchers. We advocate experimenting with different research methodologies and methods so that we have a more rounded repertoire to address the most important and relevant issues in global software development research, with the forms of rigour that suit the chosen approach.     

Becoming agile together: Customer influence on agile adoption within commissioned software teams

Despite the ongoing expansion of agile practices beyond software firms, agile adoption remains risky, challenging, and poorly understood. Although agile practices emphasize self-organization and customer collaboration, we know little about how customers influence agile adoption within self-organizing teams. Here, we analyze how a commissioned software team engaged in customer collaboration during agile adoption at a Danish IT service provider. Our case study shows that the software team's transition to self-organized teamwork practices, agile planning routines, and active customer engagement was mutually dependent on the customer's trust in the software team and flexible collaborative routines. As a result, we advance a theoretical perspective of customer influence on agile adoption within commissioned software teams, implying that both software teams and customers need to navigate a contradictory tension between self-organization and collaboration to become agile together.     

Institutional boundaries and trust of virtual teams in collaborative design: An experimental study in a virtual world environment

Members of virtual teams often collaborate within and across institutional boundaries. This research investigates the effects of boundary spanning conditions on the development of team trust and team satisfaction. Two hundred and eighty-two participants carried out a collaborative design task over several weeks in a virtual world, Second Life. Multigroup structural equation modeling was used to examine our research model, which compares individual level measurement between two boundary spanning team conditions. The results indicate that trusting beliefs have a positive impact on team trust, which in turn, influences team satisfaction. Further, we found that, compared to cross-boundary teams, within-boundary teams exhibited not only higher trusting beliefs and higher satisfaction with the collaboration process but also a stronger relationship between team trust and team satisfaction. These results suggest that trust and group theories need to be interpreted in light of institutional affiliation and contextual variables. An important practical implication is that trust can be fostered in a virtual world environment and collaboration on complex tasks can be carried out effectively in virtual worlds. However, within-boundary virtual teams are preferred over cross-boundary virtual teams if satisfaction with the collaboration process is of the highest priority.     

Enabling Collaboration in Distributed Requirements Management

Requirements management, one of the most collaboration-intensive activities in software development, presents significant difficulties when stakeholders are distributed, as in today's global projects. After a review of requirements management in current work practices, the authors describe EGRET, a collaborative requirements management tool for distributed software development teams. They present their design motivations for EGRET, a preliminary evaluation of its usability, and directions for further enhancement. This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.     

Formal model for assigning human resources to teams in software projects

Context

Human resources play a critical role in software project success. However, people are still the least formalized factor in today’s process models. Generally, people are assigned to roles and project teams are formed on the basis of project leaders’ experience of people, constraints (e.g. availability) and skill requirements. Yet this process has to take multiple factors into account. Few works in the literature model this process. Most of these are informal proposals focusing on the individual assignment of people to project tasks and do not consider other aspects like team formation as a whole.

Objective

In this paper we formulate a formal model for assigning human resources to software project teams. Additionally, we describe the key results of the knowledge management process enacted to output the elements of the model.

Method

The model elements were identified using the Delphi expert consultation method and applying psychological tests. The proposed model was implemented in a software tool and validated on two software development organization assignment scenarios.

Results

We built a formal model for the process of assigning human resources to software project teams. This model takes into account as many factors as possible and aids the assignment of individuals to project roles, as well as the formation of the team as a whole.We found that the rules that were identified to form software development project teams are useful. From the tests we found that model implementation was feasible (all the executions of the implemented problem-solving algorithms output feasible solutions in response times that can be considered as acceptable).

Conclusion

Using the Delphi method we were able to propose software project roles and competences. Psychological tests and data mining tools identified useful rules for forming software project teams. These were used to build a formal model. This model was built into a tool that returns role assignments in acceptable response times. This decision support tool helps managers assign people to roles and to form teams. Using the tool, project leaders can flexibly evaluate different team make-ups, taking into account several factors, as well as different constraints and objectives.     

Factors affecting the quality of software project management: an empirical study based on the Capability Maturity Model

Rigorous project management can help raise a software product development process from an initial, immature stage that is unstable and unrepeatable to an optimized maturity level characterized by continuous improvement and innovation. Goals and actions related to a repeatable project management process have been outlined in the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The CMM provides good guidelines for initiating software process improvement particularly in the project management area; however, the successful implementation of the CMM guidelines is often not accomplished without significant organizational change involving increased emphasis on change management, teams and employee empowerment. This paper is empirically based on observations, surveys, and interviews of project team managers and project team members in a large, multinational organiplanning, change management, quality management, team work, and process control. Findings presented in this paper are correlated with the CMM guidelines as well as organizational factors that were found to enable or impede the successful deployment of various aspects of a project management improvement plan. The role of education and training in process and quality techniques as well as project management tools that support group work is also examined. This paper provides some insight into the issues faced by organizations based on traditional hierarchy or matrix management as they attempt to move into a more process-driven, quality-oriented development environment. As organizations move towards global markets they need increased emphasis on quality, value, teams, standards and global project management strategies based on structured guidelines to handle process flow within and between projects, departments, organizations, and national boundaries.     

Individual empowerment of agile and non-agile software developers in small teams

ContextEmpowerment of employees at work has been known to have a positive impact on job motivation and satisfaction. Software development is a field of knowledge work wherein one should also expect to see these effects, and the idea of empowerment has become particularly visible in agile methodologies, in which proponents emphasise team empowerment and individual control of the work activities as a central concern.ObjectiveThis research aims to get a better understanding of how empowerment is enabled in software development teams, both agile and non-agile, to identify differences in empowering practices and levels of individual empowerment.MethodTwenty-five interviews with agile and non-agile developers from Norway and Canada on decision making and empowerment are analysed. The analysis is conducted using a conceptual model with categories for involvement, structural empowerment and psychological empowerment.ResultsBoth kinds of development organisations are highly empowered and they are similar in most aspects relating to empowerment. However, there is a distinction in the sense that agile developers have more possibilities to select work tasks and influence the priorities in a development project due to team empowerment. Agile developers seem to put a higher emphasis on the value of information in decision making, and have more prescribed activities to enable low-cost information flow. More power is obtained through the achievement of managing roles for the non-agile developers who show interest and are rich in initiatives.ConclusionAgile developers have a higher sense of being able to impact the organisation than non-agile developers and have information channels that is significantly differently from non-agile developers. For non-agile teams, higher empowerment can be obtained by systematically applying low-cost participative decision making practices in the manager–developer relation and among peer developers. For agile teams, it is essential to more rigorously follow the empowering practices already established.     

Action-embedded transformational leadership in self-managing global information systems development teams

While software development teams are becoming more and more distributed around the globe, most software development methodologies used by global teams prescribe self-managing teams. Transformational leadership is the key to successful information systems development and use for competitive advantage. Yet, little is known about transformational leadership in self-managing global information systems development team settings. This study answers the research question of how leaders emerge and strategically influence systems development in self-managing global information systems development teams. This question is answered with a grounded theory study of Apache Open Source Software development teams. A theoretical model of action-embedded transformational leadership is developed to demonstrate how leaders emerge and strategically influence systems development efforts through their leadership, which is embedded in their work-related actions.     

Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. Among these challenges are the use of information and communication technology (ICT), a multicultural workforce, and organizational designs that involve global virtual teams. Ad hoc teams create both opportunities and challenges for organizations and many organizations are trying to understand how the virtual environment affects team effectiveness. Our exploratory study focused on the effects of cultural diversity and ICT on team effectiveness. Interviews with 41 team members from nine countries employed by a Fortune 500 corporation were analyzed. Results suggested that cultural diversity had a positive influence on decision-making and a negative influence on communication. ICT mitigated the negative impact on intercultural communication and supported the positive impact on decision-making. Effective technologies for intercultural communication included e-mail, teleconferencing combined with e-Meetings, and team rooms. Cultural diversity influenced selection of the communication media.     

Perceived barriers to effective knowledge sharing in agile software teams

While the literature offers several frameworks that explain barriers to knowledge sharing within software development teams, little is known about differences in how team members perceive these barriers. Based on an in‐depth multi‐case study of four software projects, we investigate how project managers, developers, testers and user representatives think about barriers to effective knowledge sharing in agile development. Adapting comparative causal mapping, we constructed causal maps for each of the four roles and identified overlap and divergence in map constructs and causal linkages. The results indicate that despite certain similarities, the four roles differ in how they perceive and emphasize knowledge‐sharing barriers. The project managers put primary emphasis on project setting barriers, while the primary concern of developers, testers and user representatives were project communication, project organization and team capabilities barriers, respectively. Integrating the four causal maps and the agile literature, we propose a conceptual framework with seven types of knowledge‐sharing barriers and 37 specific barriers. We argue that to bridge communication gaps and create shared understanding in software teams, it is critical to take the revealed concerns of different roles into account. We conclude by discussing our findings in relation to knowledge sharing in agile teams and software teams more generally.