Coordination of Software Development Teams across Organizational Boundary -- An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Coordinating teams across geographical, temporal and cultural boundaries has been identified as a critical task to achieve the success of global software projects. Organizational boundary is another dimension of global distribution, which is a less visible but equally important factor that influences team coordination. This study investigates attributes of the organizational boundary that inhibits coordination and development activities. Besides, we explore a set of effective coordination practices to overcome organizational boundary. The data were collected from two projects involving four different software development organizations. We found that the variety on collaboration policy, team organization, engineering process, and development practices contributes to extra coordination efforts, insufficient communication, team awareness and mistrust. The study also highlights that coordination practices, such as face-to-face contact, process synchronization and shared collaborative development are compulsory but not sufficient for effective team coordination across organizational boundary.