research-article

Configuring global software teams: a multi-company analysis of project productivity, quality, and profits

Authors:

Narayan Ramasubbu,

Marcelo Cataldo,

Rajesh Krishna Balan,

James D. HerbslebAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 261 - 270

https://doi.org/10.1145/1985793.1985830

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we examined the impact of project-level configurational choices of globally distributed software teams on project productivity, quality, and profits. Our analysis used data from 362 projects of four different firms. These projects spanned a wide range of programming languages, application domain, process choices, and development sites spread over 15 countries and 5 continents. Our analysis revealed fundamental tradeoffs in choosing configurational choices that are optimized for productivity, quality, and/or profits. In particular, achieving higher levels of productivity and quality require diametrically opposed configurational choices. In addition, creating imbalances in the expertise and personnel distribution of project teams significantly helps increase profit margins. However, a profit-oriented imbalance could also significantly affect productivity and/or quality outcomes. Analyzing these complex tradeoffs, we provide actionable managerial insights that can help software firms and their clients choose configurations that achieve desired project outcomes in globally distributed software development.

References

[1]

R. D. Banker and S. A. Slaughter, "The Moderating Effects of Structure on Volatility and Complexity in Software Enhancement," Information Systems Research, vol. 11, pp. 0219--0240, 2000.

Digital Library

[2]

C. Bird, N. Nagappan, P. Devanbu, H. Gall, and B. Murphy, "Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista," ICSE 2009.

Digital Library

[3]

W. F. Boh, S. A. Slaughter, and J. A. Espinosa, "Learning from Experience in Software Development: A Multilevel Analysis," Management Science, vol. 53, pp. 1315--1331, 2007.

Digital Library

[4]

E. Carmel, Global Software Teams: Collaboration across Borders and Time Zones: Prentice-Hall, 1999.

Digital Library

[5]

E. Carmel and P. Abbott, "Why 'Nearshore' Means That Distance Matters," CACM, vol. 50, pp. 40--46, 2007.

Digital Library

[6]

M. Cataldo, M. Bass, J. D. Herbsleb, and L. Bass, "On Coordination Mechanisms in Global Software Development," ICGSE, Munich, Germany, 2007.

Digital Library

[7]

M. Cataldo, J. D. Herbsleb, and K. M. Carley, "Socio-Technical Congruence," Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement symposium, Kaiserslautern, Germany, 2008.

Digital Library

[8]

M. Cataldo and S. Nambiar, "On the Relationship between Process Maturity and Geographic Distribution: An Empirical Analysis of Their Impact on Software Quality," FSE 2009.

Digital Library

[9]

J. N. Cummings, J. A. Espinosa, and C. K. Pickering, "Crossing Spatial and Temporal Boundaries in Globally Distributed Projects," Information Systems Research, vol. 20, pp. 420--439, 2009.

Digital Library

[10]

B. Curtis, H. Krasner, and N. Iscoe, "A Field Study of the Software Design Process for Large Systems," Communications of ACM, vol. 31, pp. 1268--1287, 1988.

Digital Library

[11]

R. Davidson and J. G. Mackinnon, Estimation and Inference in Econometrics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

[12]

J. A. Espinosa, N. Nan, and E. Carmel, "Do Gradations of Time Zone Separation Make a Difference in Performance? A First Laboratory Study," ICGSE, Munich, Germany, 2007.

Digital Library

[13]

J. A. Espinosa, S. A. Slaughter, R. E. Kraut, and J. D. Herbsleb, "Familiarity, Complexity, and Team Performance in Geographically Distributed Software Development," Organization Science, vol. 18, pp. 613--630, 2007.

Digital Library

[14]

R. E. Grinter, J. D. Herbsleb, and D. E. Perry, "The Geography of Coordination: Dealing with Distance in R&D Work," in International ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting Group Work, Phoenix, Arizona, 1999.

Digital Library

[15]

D. E. Harter, M. S. Krishnan, and S. A. Slaughter, "Effects of Process Maturity on Quality, Cycle Time, and Effort in Software Product Development," Management Science, vol. 46, pp. 0451--0466, 2000.

Digital Library

[16]

J. D. Herbsleb and A. Mockus, "An Empirical Study of Speed and Communication in Globally Distributed Software Development," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 29, pp. 481--494, 2003.

Digital Library

[17]

M. S. Krishnan, C. H. Kriebel, S. Kekre, and T. Mukhopadhyay, "An Empirical Analysis of Productivity and Quality in Software Products," Management Science, vol. 46, pp. 0745-0759, 2000.

Digital Library

[18]

M. B. O'Leary and J. N. Cummings, "The Spatial, Temporal, and Configurational Characteristics of Geographic Dispersion in Teams," MIS Quarterly, vol. 31, pp. 433--452, 2007.

Digital Library

[19]

M. B. O'Leary and M. Mortensen, "Subgroups, Imbalance, and Isolates in Geographically Dispersed Teams," Organization Science, vol. 21, pp. 115--131, 2010.

Digital Library

[20]

G. M. Olson and J. S. Olson, "Distance Matters," Int. Journal of Human Computer Interaction, vol. 15, pp. 139--178, 2000.

Digital Library

[21]

R. Prikladnicki and J. Audy, "Distributed Software Development: Toward an Understanding of the Relationship between Project Team, Users and Customers," International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2003.

[22]

N. Ramasubbu and R. K. Balan, "Globally Distributed Software Development Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis," FSE, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2007.

Digital Library

[23]

C. R. B. d. Souza, D. Redmiles, L.-T. Cheng, D. Millen, and J. Patterson, "How a Good Software Practice Thwarts Collaboration: The Multiple Roles of Apis in Software Development," ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, vol. 29, pp. 221--230, 2004.

Digital Library

[24]

J. J. Treinen and S. L. Miller-Frost, "Following the Sun: Case Studies in Global Software Development," IBM Systems Journal, vol. 45, pp. 773--783, 2006.

Digital Library

Cited By

Graf-Vlachy LWagner S(2024)Cleaning Up Confounding: Accounting for Endogeneity Using Instrumental Variables and Two-Stage ModelsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367473033:8(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674730
Mok LSun LSen SSarrafzadeh B(2023)Challenging but Connective: Large-Scale Characteristics of Synchronous Collaboration Across Time ZonesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581141(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581141
Cheng LMurphy-Hill ECanning MJaspan CGreen CKnight AZhang NKammer ERoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)What improves developer productivity at google? code qualityProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3558940(1302-1313)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3558940
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Configuring global software teams: a multi-company analysis of project productivity, quality, and profits
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
      2. System management
        Quality assurance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Programming teams
    2. Software development process management

Recommendations

Globally distributed software development project performance: an empirical analysis
ESEC-FSE '07: Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering

Software firms are increasingly distributing their software development effort across multiple locations. In this paper we present the results of a two year field study that investigated the effects of dispersion on the productivity and quality of ...
Globally distributed software development project performance: an empirical analysis
ISEC '08: Proceedings of the 1st India software engineering conference

Software firms are increasingly distributing their software development effort across multiple locations. In this paper we present the results of a two year field study that investigated the effects of dispersion on the productivity and quality of ...
Towards governance schemes for distributed software development projects
SDG '08: Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Software development governance

Growth in the adoption of distributed software development business models continues to outpace the development of robust governance schemes for them. In the absence of specific well-tested governance schemes, distributed software teams continue to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2011

1258 pages

ISBN:9781450304450

DOI:10.1145/1985793

General Chair:
Richard N. Taylor
UC Irvine, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Harald Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland
,
Nenad Medvidović
University of Southern California, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 May 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ICSE11

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 21 - 28, 2011

HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

73
Total Citations
View Citations
851
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)29
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 28 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Graf-Vlachy LWagner S(2024)Cleaning Up Confounding: Accounting for Endogeneity Using Instrumental Variables and Two-Stage ModelsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367473033:8(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674730
Mok LSun LSen SSarrafzadeh B(2023)Challenging but Connective: Large-Scale Characteristics of Synchronous Collaboration Across Time ZonesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581141(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581141
Cheng LMurphy-Hill ECanning MJaspan CGreen CKnight AZhang NKammer ERoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)What improves developer productivity at google? code qualityProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3558940(1302-1313)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3558940
Breideband TTalkad Sukumar PMark GCaruso MD'Mello SStriegel A(2022)Home-Life and Work Rhythm Diversity in Distributed Teamwork: A Study with Information Workers during the COVID-19 PandemicProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35129426:CSCW1(1-23)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3512942
Staron M(2022)Introduction to the Metrics ThemeAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_9(155-161)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_9
Jongeling RCiccozzi FCicchetti ACarlson J(2022)Chapter 6 Lightweight Consistency Checking for Agile Model-Based Development in PracticeAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_8(131-151)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_8
Berger CEklund U(2022)Chapter 5 Expectations and Challenges from Scaling Agile in Mechatronics-Driven Companies – A Comparative Case StudyAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_7(119-130)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_7
Martini ABesker TBosch J(2022)Chapter 4 Technical Debt Tracking: Current State of Practice: A Survey and Multiple Case Study in 15 Large OrganizationsAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_6(87-118)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_6
Berger CCarlson J(2022)Introduction to the Continuous Architecture ThemeAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_5(85-86)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_5
Mårtensson TStåhl DMartini ABosch J(2022)Chapter 3 Efficient and Effective Exploratory Testing of Large-Scale Software SystemsAccelerating Digital Transformation10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_4(51-81)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10873-0_4
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten