
Software Development on Conference Calls!

Global software development has caught on as a widely used paradigm in creating software products. This is becoming essential to be close to customers and to improve time-to-market with the product.
However, do we understand the problems of global software development, their impact and ways for improvement? 
“The lack of spontaneous and opportunistic communication is the biggest challenge to developing software across geographical boundaries”, says James Herbsleb who works on finding better ways to do global software development at Bell Labs.
ICSE 2001 featured several events on this topic. The opening keynote by Daniel Sabbah addressed software development over the Internet and notes that “the major challenge is not as much distance but more about culture. Moreover, not as much culture in that, for example, Germans collaborating with British or North Americans, but the development culture. It is the local context, in particular process models that teams at distributed sites follow that affects the success of development at remote sites.”
Similarly, participants at the Workshop of SE over the Internet debated problems: 
Walt Scacchi: “When you go across organizations, you don’t have a single culture or technological regime, and you must go beyond technology to understand how people work together.“
Heather Oppenheimer: “In SE we don’t know how to work together. And this gets exacerbated in distributed environments. It may be that distributed collaboration can help in situations where face-to-face meetings can harm, e.g., in software inspections and requirements negotiations.” 
Filippo Lanubile: “Which practices in open source development are appropriate to corporate distributed software development?”
In conclusion, James Herbsleb emphasizes that it is time to learn from CSCW in approaching these problems. “CSCW has tackled the problems of communication, coordination and collaboration for quite some time and existing collaboration tools could be very useful for SE. We need to try to introduce these technologies and methods of integrating them in distributed software development.” 
— Daniela Damian and Nigamanth Sridhar
