Collaboration in Distributed Software Development
Software Engineering
CHASE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects on Software Engineering
Proceedings of the the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
Sources of errors in distributed development projects: implications for collaborative tools
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Bridging gaps between developers and testers in globally-distributed software development
Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research
Your time zone or mine?: a study of globally time zone-shifted collaboration
Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
"Follow the Sun" Workflow in Global Software Development
Journal of Management Information Systems
Hi-index | 0.01 |
We often hear that global software engineering teams are affected by time differences. While there is considerable research on the difficulties of distance, culture and other dimensions, there has been little research that isolated the impact of just time differences. The research question that guides us is whether there are gradual differences across time zones that impact team performance. In this study we conducted a laboratory experiment with 42 dyadic teams. The teams were randomly assigned into 4 time zone overlap conditions: full overlap, 2/3 overlap, 1/3 overlap and no overlap. Using a fictional map task, we found that participants' perceptions of process are unrelated to actual objective performance measures of speed and accuracy. Consistent with our expectations, we found that a small time separation has no effect on accuracy, but that more time separation has a significant effect on accuracy. Also consistent with our expectations, we found that a small amount of time separation has a significant effect on production speed. However, contrary to our expectations, we found that further increases in partial overlap have less significant effects on speed, and when there is no overlap speed actually increases, albeit not significantly - a "U-shaped" effect.