Editorial

Guest editorial: Studying work practices in Global Software Engineering

Software-driven applications increasingly pervade our lives, be it related to work or to leisure activities. This trend is rather obvious in the industrialised part of the world, but also present in emerging and developing countries. Since the societal need for software production is on the rise, the software industry is growing and getting more globally interconnected.

Compared to material products, software has some specific characteristics facilitating the globalisation of its production and distribution. Due to its immateriality, software code is easy to copy and to transport. While the distributed production of material products always requires shipping between locations, distributed work in the software industry can happen quasi synchronously with minor transportation costs. While the duplication of material products requires about the same input of resources, software can be duplicated at very low costs.

Due to its growth over the past decades, the software industry in the industrialised world is characterised by a shortage of qualified labour, and as a result, a rather high level of wages. Given the specific characteristics of software, it is not surprising that the software industry in industrialised countries tried to move parts of its development work to countries that have a large pool of talent available and lower income levels. At the same time, the domestic market for IT products in these countries began to grow at an even faster rate.

While these structural conditions seem to favour higher levels of globalisation in the software industry, there are also extremely relevant factors impeding globalisation that need to be taken into account. First, the application of software is linked to the local context of usage. Many software artefacts are deeply interrelated with the users’ social practices. These practices are shaped by history and culture. Therefore, the design of most software artefacts needs to take local requirements into account. In these cases, a process of Global Software Development needs to be grounded in the local practices of users. Secondly, the development of large size software applications depends on complex and highly cooperative work. Differences in language, cultural and educational backgrounds, as well as time zones can have a substantially disruptive effect on the software development work.

Global Software Engineering seems to be an important development line in the software industry. However, a careful analysis of the phenomenon is required to identify projects that, based on their characteristics, are suitable for a distributed division of labour. For these projects (or parts of them), we need to identify practices that draw on the opportunities offered by distributed work, while at the same time dealing with the related obstacles. This is a challenge for both academia and industry. Companies wishing to take advantage of globalisation need to develop innovative techniques, tools and practices to overcome the various difficulties of organising and managing globally distributed software development. The academic field of software engineering, as well, needs to develop appropriate methods and perspectives to investigate the phenomenon of highly distributed work and to support practitioners in dealing with the related challenges.

The field of Global Software Engineering (GSE) – or Global Software Development (GSD), as it is sometimes called – emerged as a transdisciplinary research arena, bringing together software engineers as well as social scientists and organisation theorists involved in examining various aspects of how globally distributed software teams function. The International Conference on Global Software Engineering has contributed significantly to the emergence of a community made of both scholars and practitioners interested in the field, and to the creation of a body of work related to Global Software Engineering.

Given the challenges of understanding globally distributed work in the software industry, we believe that a change in methodological focus is needed. While there have been many experimental studies on problem-solving in teams, as well as interview studies with management referring to problems in distributed coordination and management, extensive participative field study material on actual workplace practices is still relatively meagre. Thus, despite occasional empirical studies of distributed software development activities over the years, there is still a dearth of well-designed studies in Information Systems, Software Engineering and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) that would provide good examples of field research in the area.

A lack of appreciation and understanding of actual work practices led to problematic perspectives of how highly distributed work should be set up in the software industry. Voices from academia and consultancies expressed the opinion that the additional complexity of distributed work could revitalize a vision of software engineering that had not been too successful in practice before. Slogans such as the “24 h factory” propagated detailed process modelling, rigid definition of the interfaces between tasks allocated to different sites, and a high level of formalization in the development process. However, practical experiences in distributed work quickly showed the limitation of this type of visions [1].

Building on the CSCW tradition, we believe that a profound understanding of software development work practices – as opposed to canonical or espoused theories of work practices – can enrich the software engineering discourse and lead to appropriate process models, levels of formalization, and tool support. Against this background, the purpose of this special section is to examine practices of Global Software Engineering and to reflect upon the strengths and limitations of empirical research methods being deployed in the field.

Dittrich et al. [2] have already demonstrated the relevance of qualitative research in Software Engineering. They indicated how methods and theoretical frameworks can vary significantly across studies, used “under different epistemological paradigms, and with different theoretical underpinnings”. Methods are not simply techniques to be chosen and deployed at will, but are constructed from particular conceptual worldviews, and entail theoretical commitments. The actual use of methods also requires training and sensitivity to the local situation. Since these issues are not very often adequately dealt with, we have asked the authors to carefully reflect on them in this volume.