Global Software Development and Delay: Does Distance Still Matter?

Abstract

Nowadays, distributed development is common in software development. Besides many advantages, research in the last decade has consistently found that distribution has a negative impact on collaboration in general, and communication and task completion time in particular. Adapted processes, practices and tools are demanded to overcome these challenges. We report on an empirical study of communication structures and delay, as well as task completion times in IBM's distributed development project Jazz. The Jazz project explicitly focuses on distributed collaboration and has adapted processes and tools to overcome known challenges. We explored the effect of distance on communication and task completion time and use social network analysis to obtain insights about the collaboration in the Jazz project. We discuss our findings in the light of existing literature on distributed collaboration and delays.