REQUIREMENTS COMMUNICATION CULTURE IN MOBILE SERVICES DEVELO(2)

“Culture is one thing and varnish is another.”

work across sites, spanning national, language, and cultural barriers (see, e.g.,6). Driven by market and resource requirements, the push toward globalization has generated a wide variety of problems for software developers7.

Previous research8 suggests that cross-site communication and coordination issues cause a substantial loss of development speed (Herbsleb et al. 2001).”

Studies provided by Heeks, Krishna et al. highlight some of the cultural differences that might arise in a distributed working relationship:

“Global9’s systems were drawn from a culture of objectivity and accountability. Forcing one set of values onto the other was hard, and Shiva10’s values proved quite resilient. It took enormous efforts before the Shiva project leader would produce a standardized monthly progress report, and Shiva staff refused to participate in Global’s employee satisfaction survey (Heeks et al. 2001).”

There exists, intuitively, even more compelling propositions about the challenges of global outsourcing, which include: Troublesome communication across sites; participants having different backgrounds; participants not having participated in similar projects previously, participants having different training, coming from different cultures and speaking different native languages. Moreover, Herbsleb and Mockus maintain that in these projects participants are much less likely to have serendipitous contact with each other across sites, due to the lack of face-to-face hallway encounters, and lunch meetings. There are fewer chance encounters with remote colleagues in other words and implicitly, therefore, this is where the improvement of outsourcing projects might be found (Herbsleb et al. 2001).

“In organizations with rapidly changing environments and unstable projects, informal communication is particularly important11. For example, as requirements change, it is hard for the formal mechanisms of communication, such as specification documents, to react quickly enough (Herbsleb et al. 2001).” Similarly, the core of the countermeasures proposed by Heeks et al., indicate that issues (even those relating to cultural differences) in outsourcing are generally related to some form of co-ordination: Synching, using “straddlers”, building bridging relationships, etc (Heeks et al. 2001).

Prikladnicki, Nicolas et al. summarize that the following measures are important in coming to terms with globally distributed software development, particularly with respect to enabling “multinationals and virtual corporations to operate successfully across geographic and cultural boundaries” (Prikladnicki, Nicolas and Evaristo 2003):

A universal and well-defined software development process is needed in outsourcing projects Requirements engineering ought to be seen as a seminal activity, which governs the process Planning needs to be thorough and proper, following it up with careful management of the

execution as well as risk factors

Building a global team with an exchange program for executives can make the challenges

linked to social and cultural differences more manageable

Ironically, such recommendations do not seem to make that much of a difference in ordinary non-outsourced and local projects, either (Basili and Perricone 1984). The problem actually seems to be that some challenges of software development persistently plague software engineering in general: It is

Carmel, E., Global Software Teams. 1999, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Special Issue, IEEE Software, Global Software Development, March, 2001. 8 Herbsleb, J. D. and R. E. Grinter. Splitting the Organization and Integrating the Code: Conway’s Law Revisited. in 21st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 99). 1999. Los Angeles, CA: ACM Press 85-95.

J.D. Herbsleb, A. Mockus, T.A. Finholt, and R.E. Grinter, “An Empirical Study of Global Software Development: Distance and Speed,” Proc. Int’l Conf. Software Eng., pp. 81-90, 2001. 9 An American telecommunications company (Heeks et al. 2001). 10 A leading software exporter in India (Heeks et al. 2001). 11 Galbraith, J. (1977). Organizational design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley and Kraut, R. E. & Streeter., L. A. (1995). Coordination in software development. Communications of the ACM, 38(3), 69-81. 76