Formulating Effective Coordination Strategies in Agile Global Software Development Teams - Interview transcripts

Coordination of interdependent tasks across geographical, temporal and socio-cultural boundaries has been identified as a critical antecedent to global software development (GSD) team performance. Since GSD teams are increasingly required to achieve software development agility and respond to changing business requirements, conventional plan-driven software development methods become inadequate to manage the cross-boundary dependencies. To cope with this issue, there is an emerging trend of implementing change-driven agile methods in GSD; we call this practice agile GSD. This paper focuses on the formulation of coordination strategies in agile GSD. We argue that Coordination Theory (CT) can serve as a useful lens to develop a deeper understanding of the formulation process. We present a case study in a leading software development company using agile GSD and present preliminary results by applying the lens of CT.

跨越地理、时间与社会文化边界的互依任务协调，已被证实为影响全球软件开发（Global Software Development, GSD）团队绩效的关键前置因素。鉴于全球软件开发团队愈发需要达成软件开发敏捷性并响应动态变化的业务需求，传统的计划驱动型软件开发方法已难以胜任跨边界依赖关系的管理工作。为应对这一难题，全球软件开发领域逐渐兴起了应用变更驱动型敏捷方法的趋势，我们将此类实践称为敏捷型全球软件开发（Agile GSD）。本研究聚焦于敏捷型全球软件开发场景下协调策略的构建过程，我们认为，协调理论（Coordination Theory, CT）可作为一种有效的分析视角，助力我们更深入地理解协调策略的构建流程。本研究将呈现一家采用敏捷型全球软件开发模式的头部软件开发企业的案例，并基于协调理论视角展示初步研究成果。