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Sources of errors in distributed development projects: implications for collaborative tools

Published:06 February 2010Publication History

ABSTRACT

An important dimension of success in development projects is the quality of the new product. Researchers have primarily concentrated on developing and evaluating processes to reduce errors and mistakes and, consequently, achieve higher levels of quality. However, little attention has been given to other factors that have a significant impact on enabling development organizations carry the numerous development activities with minimal errors. In this paper, we examined the relative role of multiple sources of errors such as experience, geographic distribution, technical properties of the product and projects' time pressure. Our empirical analyses of 209 development projects showed that all four categories of sources of errors are quite relevant. We dis-cussed those results in terms of their implications for improving collaborative tools to support distributed development projects.

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          CSCW '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
          February 2010
          468 pages
          ISBN:9781605587950
          DOI:10.1145/1718918

          Copyright © 2010 ACM

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          Publication History

          • Published: 6 February 2010

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