In offshore development the team is separated and
implemented at different geographical locations as a result the team works on
different time zones or time shifts in a day. This reduces the opportunity for
real-time communication. The basic issue is to handle the complex communication
and team co-ordination (Sahay, Brian, and Shenai, 2003), as insufficient team communication often creates
challenges to offshore projects such as trust, relationships and efficiency of
the team (Lanubile, Calefato, and Ebert, 2013).
Approximately half of all distributed projects fail due
to insufficient communication and trust among the team members (Elbert, 2012). Awareness
is necessary for the in-distributed teams to ensure that individual
contributions, contribute to the whole group’s effort to develop software
successfully. Paul Dourish and Victoria Bellotti described group awareness as “
an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your
activity” (Dourish, Bellotti 1992).
Group awareness can help over come some challenges of
offshore projects (Lanubile, Calefato, and Ebert, 2013). There are four types of group
awareness which are (Gutwin, Greenberg, and Roseman ,1996):
- Informal awareness provides information about which team members are around and available for work.
- Group- structural awareness focuses on the knowledge roles on team members and structure of the team.
- Workspace awareness gives information about the interactions the team members have with share resources at a workspace.
- Social awareness consists of information that team members maintain about each other in conversational context for the purpose of social connections within the team.
In order to achieve group awareness in distributed teams,
technology plays an important role. In the survey conducted by Lanubile,
Calefato, and Ebert they have
focused on which technologies and tools support group awareness and
collaboration such as for informal awareness, IM and VoIP tools can be used
similarly for workspace awareness emails and RSS can be used.
Since the distributed teams are working in different time
zones or time shifts, the number of overlapping hours is less so communication
between team members has to be flexible in order to achieve an overlap with
remote colleges. For example in order to get real-time communication
occasionally one team has to stay late and the other team has to come early in
order to have a combined meeting using the help of technologies. So in order to
organise work between a team we must consider temporal distance in order to
facilitate communication (Holmstrom, Conchúir, Agerfalk and Fitzgerald,
2006). Temporal distance is a
measure of the dislocation in time experienced by two actors who wish to
interact (Pilatti, Audy, 2006).
Asynchronous tools are seen as crucial part for communication
and coordination among remote locations. Due to temporal distance the increase
in the response time creates a feeling of “being behind” as when one location
sends a request they get reply the next day. As seen in the case study done by
Boland and Fitzgerald asynchronous communication overnight can be overwhelming
for a developer beginning work in the morning. Also a study done by Helena, et al shows that limited overlap
with colleges causes delay in response which makes people lose track of the
overall work process which leads to problems in distributed yet time-crucial
work (Holmstrom, Conchúir, Agerfalk and Fitzgerald, 2006). Similarly noted by Grinter Herbsleb,
and Perry the drag in the
problem and response can cause increase in the cost.
As a result response time increases when working hours do
not overlap between the remote locations (Sarker, Sahay, 2004).
References:
- Boland, David, and Brian Fitzgerald. "Transitioning from a co-located to a globally-distributed software development Team: A Case Study at Analog Devices Inc." (2004): 4-7.
- Dourish, Paul, and Victoria Bellotti. "Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces." Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work. ACM, 1992.
- Ebert, Christof. Global software and IT: A guide to distributed development, projects, and outsourcing. Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press, 2011.
- Gutwin, Carl, Saul Greenberg, and Mark Roseman. "Workspace awareness in real-time distributed groupware: Framework, widgets, and evaluation." People and Computers (1996): 281-298.
- Holmstrom, H., Conchúir, E. Ó., Agerfalk, J., & Fitzgerald, B. (2006, October). Global software development challenges: A case study on temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance. In Global Software Engineering, 2006. ICGSE'06. International Conference on (pp. 3-11). IEEE.
- Lanubile, Filippo, Fabio Calefato, and Christof Ebert. "Group Awareness in Global Software Engineering." IEEE Software (2013): 18-23.
- Sahay, Sundeep, Brian Nicholson, and Shenai Krishna. Global IT outsourcing: software development across borders. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Sarker, Suprateek, and Sundeep Sahay. "Implications of space and time for distributed work: an interpretive study of US–Norwegian systems development teams." European Journal of Information Systems 13.1 (2004): 3-20.
- Maryam Kausar
