REQUIREMENTS COMMUNICATION CULTURE IN MOBILE SERVICES DEVELO

“Culture is one thing and varnish is another.”

REQUIREMENTS COMMUNICATION CULTURE IN MOBILE

SERVICES DEVELOPMENT

Steinar Kristoffersen, Institute for Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway,

steinkri@ifi.uio.no

“Culture is one thing and varnish is another.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Abstract

The software business is changing; partly due to a global re-distribution of engineering competencies, partly due to abundant, but marginally profitable opportunities of providing lightweight infotainment services in a global network. The software development process has not changed accordingly, and within a broader trend of globalization, companies look towards offshore outsourcing of software development as one way of cutting development costs. However, many stakeholders are discontent with the quality of deliveries from offshore projects. Many of the problems are explicated by the demographically dispersed nature of a global economy: Different cultures, language barriers and unrealistic expectations. This paper addresses these issues from another angle. Examining in-depth the development processes of an international company, it is concluded that outsourcing, rather than causing upheaval to software development, ought to be seen as subjected to the same naive division of labour as many previous attempts of ‘rationalizing’ this process. Moreover, the counter-measures usually proposed imply ‘much more of the same’ which did not work to begin with either. Therefore, globalization is putting empirical studies of software development back on the agenda and it indicates a need to re-conceptualize the entire software process. A better understanding of how programmers work is needed to back the development of methods for co-located as well as distributed development. Keywords: Requirements engineering, communication, culture, outsourcing

1 INTRODUCTION

The economy pertaining to offshore outsourcing of software development is growing at a staggering 25 percent per year1. In the public opinion, offshore development of software is seen as a threat to jobs and innovation at home2, as it seems to be based on brilliant engineers abroad working for salaries which are unbelievably low.

Outsourcing decisions are of course related to the cost of using local programmers (Kjell 2005). It may save as much as 60 percent3. It is also a contributing factor to the cost/quality aspect of using offshore development, that, e.g., India alone produces as many technical graduates as that of the entire European continent and about twice as many as that of the United States4. Today India alone has an offshore development industry of somewhere in the region of $15 billion. Mockus and Herbsleb point additionally to such alluring reasons for outsourcing as getting closer to international customers, complying with conditions for favourable tax conditions and short lead time if time differences can lead to round-the-clock development (Herbsleb and Mockus 2003).

There are some obvious challenges to outsourcing, however:

“Communication and coordination issues in large software engineering projects have always been formidable (e.g.5). Increasingly, engineers and managers must add the challenges of coordinating

; Tue, Jan 27, 2004 3 4 5 Brooks Jr., F. P. The Mythical Man-Month. Datamation 20, 12, 1974, 44-52. and Curtis, B., H. Krasner, and N. Iscoe. A Field Study of the Software Design Process for Large Systems. Communications of the ACM 31, 11, 1988, 1268-1287. 21