The Effects of Distance, Experience, and Communication Structure on Requirements Awareness in Two Distributed Industrial Software Projects
Irwin Kwan, Daniela Damian, Sabrina dos Santos Marczak · 2007
In global software development, communication is difficult due to distance between sites. How effectively do team members distributed among multiple geographical locations become aware of changes and clarifications to requirements? In a case study of two different global software development projects, we observed how requirement analysts, developers, and testers maintain awareness of changes in the project. To gather data, we attended local and remote meetings, and conducted interviews of project team members. Based on our experience with these projects, we discuss the following awareness factors in software development: distance, experience of team members, and communication structure. We present the effects on awareness, and provide some lessons learned for global software development projects. We expect these lessons learned can be used by projects with similar settings.