An empirical study of the coordination in a distributed software development team

Abstract

As today's software systems become more and more complicated, coordinating the development of such systems has been an important factor to their successful implementation. The need for good coordination is especially important when the development team is geographically distributed and has to rely on information and communication technologies to support its activities. With limited available coordination mechanisms, distributed software teams need to carry out a set of coordination functions effectively throughout the software development process. In addition, in response to the changes in context and task, distributed software teams needed to be adaptive in their coordination. In this study, I try to understand how different coordination methods and tools could serve the changing coordination needs in software development through an empirical study of a distributed software team's practice.