ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently altered workplace structures, making remote work a widespread practice. While many employees advocate for flexibility, many employers reconsider their attitude toward remote work and opt for structured return-to-office mandates. Media headlines repeatedly emphasize that the corporate world returns to full-time office work. This study examines how companies in software-intensive industry regulate work location, whether corporate policies have evolved in the last five years, and, if so, how, and why. We collected data on remote work regulation from corporate HR and management representatives from 68 companies that vary in size, location, and preferred work modality. Our findings reveal that although many companies prioritize office-oriented work (50%), most companies in our sample permit hybrid work (84%) and only four companies are returning to full-time office work. Remote work regulation does not reveal any particular new “best practice” as policies differ greatly; however, the single most popular arrangement was the three in-office days per week. More than half of the companies (53%) encourage or mandate office attendance centrally, with additional 18% having decentralized mandates. Over a quarter (28%) have changed regulations gradually increasing the mandatory office presence or implementing differentiated conditions. Our key recommendation for office-oriented companies is to consider trust-based recommendations as an alternative to centralized office presence mandates, while for companies oriented toward remote working, we warn about the points of no (or hard) return. Finally, the current state of policies is clearly not final, as companies continue to experiment and adjust their work regulation

Existing commercial and in-house software development tools are often inaccessible to blind and low vision software professionals (BLVSPs), hindering their participation and career growth at work.Building on existing research on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) assistive technologies and customized tools made by programmers, we shed light on the currently unexplored intersection of how DIY tools built and used by BLVSPs support accessible software development.Through semi-structured interviews with 30 BLVSPs, we found that such tools serve many diferent purposes and are driven by motivations such as desiring to maintain a professional image and a sense of dignity at work.These tools had signifcant impacts on workplace accessibility and revealed a need for a more centralized community for sharing tools, tips, and tricks.Based on our fndings, we introduce the "Double Hacker Dilemma" and highlight a need for developing more efective peer and organizational platforms that support DIY tool sharing.

Introduction : Digital products increasingly reshape industries, influencing human behavior and decision-making. However, the software development teams developing these systems often lack diversity, which may lead to designs that overlook the needs, equal treatment or safety of diverse user groups. These risks highlight the need for fostering diversity and inclusion in software development to create safer, more equitable technology. Method : This research is based on insights from an academic meeting in June 2023 involving 23 software engineering researchers and practitioners. We used the collaborative discussion method 1-2-4-ALL as a systematic research approach and identified six themes around the theme “challenges and opportunities to improve Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion (SDDI).” We identified benefits, harms, and future research directions for the four main themes. Then, we discuss the remaining two themes, AI & SDDI and AI & Computer Science education, which have a cross-cutting effect on the other themes. Results : This research explores the key challenges and research opportunities for promoting SDDI, providing a roadmap to guide both researchers and practitioners. We underline that research around SDDI requires a constant focus on maximizing benefits while minimizing harms, especially to vulnerable groups. As a research community, we must strike this balance in a responsible way.

As GenAI becomes embedded in developer toolchains and practices, and routine code is increasingly generated, human creativity will be increasingly important for generating competitive advantage. This article uses the McLuhan tetrad alongside scenarios of how GenAI may disrupt software development more broadly, to identify potential impacts GenAI may have on creativity within software development. The impacts are discussed along with a future research agenda comprising five connected themes that consider how individual capabilities, team capabilities, the product, unintended consequences, and society can be affected.

In this paper, we use the lens of co-creation---a concept originally coined and applied in the fields of management and design that denotes how groups of people collaboratively create something of meaning through an orchestration of people, activities, and tools---to study how fully remote software teams co-create digital artifacts that can be considered as a form of documentation. We report on the results of a qualitative, interview-based study with 25 software professionals working in remote teams. Our primary findings are the definition of four models of co-creation, examples of sequencing these models into work chains to produce artifacts, factors that influence how developers match tasks to models and chains, and insights into tool support for co-creation. Together, our findings illustrate how co-creation is an intentional activity that has a significant role in how remote software teams' choose to structure their collaborative activities.

Defining and designing a software product is not merely a technical endeavor, but also a socio-technical journey. As such, its success is associated with human-related aspects, such as the value users perceive. To handle this issue, the product manager role has become more evident in software-intensive companies. A unique, challenging context for these professionals is constituted by software startups, emerging companies developing novel solutions looking for sustainable and scalable business models. This study aims to describe the role of product managers in the context of software startups. We performed a Socio-Technical Grounded Theory study using data from blog posts and interviews. The results describe the product manager as a multidisciplinary, general role, not only guiding the product by developing its vision but also as a connector that emerges in a growing company, enabling communication of software development with other areas, mainly business and user experience. The professional performing this role has a background in one of these areas but a broad knowledge and understanding of key concepts of the other areas is needed. We also describe how differences of this role to other lead roles are perceived in practice. Our findings represent several implications for research, such as better understanding of the role transformation in growing software startups, practice, e.g., identifying the points to which a professional migrating to this role should pay attention, and the education of future software developers, by suggesting the inclusion of related topics in the education and training of future software engineers.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools and techniques have increasingly effectively supported Software Engineering (SE) tasks, whether for requirements classification, software refactoring, defect prediction, and many others. In the context of software StartUps, where innovative and scalable software products are developed, dealing with the pressure of fast delivery of a working solution becomes a challenging factor. We aim to investigate AI and ML techniques used by SE practitioners and entrepreneurs to support their Software Development Processes (SDP) and thus enable their use by software StartUps. We seek to identify this information through the application of an online Survey instrument, mainly disseminated in Brazil and Finland. This preliminary study provides insights that can support improving the SDP in StartUps.

Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders’ collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile? In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile? We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15 percent). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.

Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS) allows a requester to increase the speed of its software development efforts by submitting a task to be performed by the crowd. SW CS is usually structured around software platforms, which are used by crowd members to identify a task suited for them, gather information about this task, and finally, submit a solution for it. In competitive software crowdsourcing, members of the crowd independently create solutions while competing against each other by monetary rewards for task completion. While competition usually reduces collaboration, in this paper, we investigated how crowd members create a collaborative behavior during programming challenges using online forums to help each other, share useful information, and discuss important documents and artifacts. We also investigated different collaborative behaviours by crowd members and and how this collaboration is associated with crowd members' improved outcome in the challenges. These results are based on analysis of the online forums from Topcoder, one of the largest competitive SW CS platforms

Context: Software start-ups are emerging as suppliers of innovation and software-intensive products. However, traditional software engineering practices are not evaluated in the context, nor adopted to goals and challenges of start-ups. As a result, there is insufficient support for software engineering in the start-up context. Objective: We aim to collect data related to engineering goals, challenges, and practices in start-up companies to ascertain trends and patterns characterizing engineering work in start-ups. Such data allows researchers to understand better how goals and challenges are related to practices. This understanding can then inform future studies aimed at designing solutions addressing those goals and challenges. Besides, these trends and patterns can be useful for practitioners to make more informed decisions in their engineering practice. Method: We use a case survey method to gather first-hand, in-depth experiences from a large sample of software start-ups. We use open coding and cross-case analysis to describe and identify patterns, and corroborate the findings with statistical analysis. Results: We analyze 84 start-up cases and identify 16 goals, 9 challenges, and 16 engineering practices that are common among start-ups. We have mapped these goals, challenges, and practices to start-up life-cycle stages (inception, stabilization, growth, and maturity). Thus, creating the progression model guiding software engineering efforts in start-ups. Conclusions: We conclude that start-ups to a large extent face the same challenges and use the same practices as established companies. However, the primary software engineering challenge in start-ups is to evolve multiple process areas at once, with a little margin for serious errors.

Developing soft skills as well as other non-technical issues is essential for a successful career in software engineering. Educators, practitioners and researchers are paying more attention to this matter as they understand its importance to a software development context. Even the IEEE/ACM software engineering guidelines has already pointed out the importance of working with real-world projects in order to develop such skills. Being technically competent is not enough; students should have opportunities to go beyond coding and experience interactions with real users in order to better prepare themselves for their future. In this sense, this paper presents a software engineering undergraduate program that connects students with real projects throughout its curriculum. In order to evaluate whether this program helps students into understanding the importance of connecting and interacting with real stakeholders, we performed a survey with 111 students from this program. Our results indicate that providing a structure throughout the program in which students actually work on real projects is beneficial for their soft skills development.

The Lean Startup methodology disseminated the concept of MVP. Since then, the term has been used in several contexts aside startups with a blur definition. Practitioners name several artifacts as MVPs, such as prototypes or initial versions of a new product, rather than an instrument for experimentation. Given the importance of experimentation to the success rate of software startups, it is essential to understand if the experimentation element is still present in practitioners' understanding of the term and how they applied MVPs. To achieve this objective, we performed a survey with practitioners and coded their answers according to aspects found in a systematic mapping study on MVP. Our results indicate that MVP is mostly associated with the ideas of a product version and customer value rather than hypothesis testing and learning processes. Additionally, those respondents that focused on the first related group of terms did not give experiments as examples of MVP. In contrast, the opposite happened to those that used the second group.

In the past few years, data lakes emerged as a trending topic in big data technologies.Although literature presents different points of view related to its functionalities, it serves mainly to store a variety of data in a big data context.In this paper, we aim to identify and analyze data lake definitions and possible architectures.Our methodology was composed of a systematic literature mapping based on PRISMA, software engineering best practices to perform reviews, and Kappa method to assess results' quality.We performed the search in eight different electronic databases to achieve a wide variety of publishers in Computer Science.We first identified 662 papers matching our search criteria; after filtering, we selected 87 papers for review.We found that the term data lakes was first defined by James Dixon in 2010.We also found that the term is often related to raw data repositories.From the identified definitions, we propose a new one as a means to better state what data lakes refer to and improve how the community use them.Moreover, we foind that Hadoop and its ecosystem compose the most used toolset to create data lakes, revealing that this is the mainstream in architectures for data lakes as of today's available technologies.

The need of skills other than technical from software developers is becoming evident. The DevOps movement is an example of that applied to operational tasks. Startup development methodologies focus on business activities in innovative organizations. Several universities offer courses based on these methodologies to software engineering students, mainly to improve their creativity, problem solving, and business skills. This paper investigates how software engineering students learned startup development methodologies and discusses what are the challenges and benefits in their learning process. We conducted a multi-method study in three different universities. The data was collected in two phases and analyzed using thematic analysis. Our study reveals that students realized the importance of collaboration with other courses and the importance of user involvement in development. However, students tend to over-simplify concepts, trying to adapt them to what they are familiar with. The results indicate the necessity of business education for technical students and directions for improvements.

Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline over the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirical theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, such a theory is needed if we are to define and motivate guidance in performing high quality RE research and practice. We aim at providing an empirical and externally valid foundation for a theory of RE practice, which helps software engineers establish effective and efficient RE processes in a problem-driven manner. We designed a survey instrument and an engineer-focused theory that was first piloted in Germany and, after making substantial modifications, has now been replicated in 10 countries worldwide. We have a theory in the form of a set of propositions inferred from our experiences and available studies, as well as the results from our pilot study in Germany. We evaluate the propositions with bootstrapped confidence intervals and derive potential explanations for the propositions. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from the replication studies conducted in 10 countries with participants from 228 organisations. Our results represent a substantial step forward towards developing an empirical theory of RE practice. The results reveal, for example, that there are no strong differences between organisations in different countries and regions, that interviews, facilitated meetings and prototyping are the most used elicitation techniques, that requirements are often documented textually, that traces between requirements and code or design documents are common, that requirements specifications themselves are rarely changed and that requirements engineering (process) improvement endeavours are mostly internally driven. Our study establishes a theory that can be used as starting point for many further studies for more detailed investigations. Practitioners can use the results as theory-supported guidance on selecting suitable RE methods and techniques.

This study aims to characterize the state-of-the-art of the software startup education by analyzing and identifying best practices, opportunities and gaps on this field. To do so, we conducted a systematic mapping study in order to analyze and evaluate studies on software startup education. As a result, we found 31 publications in this process. These studies were classified into four categories: real projects, multidiscipline, environment and teaching. We concluded that research on software startup education is still scarce. Furthermore, there are several gaps and opportunities to be explored in future works. One of them is the difficulty in providing a real world experience in a educational setting. Successful cases reported combine three major components: real world projects, the right environment and a multidisciplinary context.

The advances in technology have enabled people to develop services and products that can reach millions of people around the world. Facebook and Google are examples of successful startups. However, most startups fail in their first years of life. From an education standpoint, even though universities are adapting their curriculums in order to embrace startup education content, the challenge still remains: how can we provide real world experiences for students to build relevant startups? In order to fill this gap, this paper introduces the Challenge Based Startup Learning, a framework that combines the Challenge Based Learning methodology with Lean Startup and Customer Development concepts, supported by software development techniques. We have applied and evaluated the framework in an undergraduate digital entrepreneurship course. Our preliminary results indicate that students not only understood what it takes to run a real startup, but they also felt engaged and empowered by delivering a useful and meaningful software.

Training students on mobile application development inherits the challenges of teaching software engineering where the target computer is a device that has a large number of features accessible by software.Furthermore, the most related experience in teaching students reveals difficulties in developing software engineering competencies.In this paper we present results from an iOS course held in a smart learning environment that adopted the Challenge Based Learning framework as the teaching methodology.Our results indicate that combining an active methodology along with an engaging environment can foster and improve software development learning.

Context:Software startups are increasingly seen as opportunities in a varieties of areas; from simple applications, as personal controls, to complex solutions, involving artificial intelligence or using big data.The process of developing these solutions happens quickly and in abbreviated form.Thus, software engineering should be adapted to better understand this world of software startups in a way to assist them in their customer discovery challenges and in the search for scalable business models.Main Goal: Understand the factors that positively and negatively influence the software development of software startups and present solutions found in an empirical study on startups located in an innovation ecosystem Methodology: We conducted interviews and observations as data collection techniques in eight software startups located at a Tech Park.

Managers need to decide on how they will configure their virtual teams each time a new project starts. So questions such as 'Which countries should be involved in the project?' and 'How large should the team size be?' need to be answered before hand. Project configurations are known to affect communication, coordination and collaboration aspects of a project, and as a consequence, its performance. Therefore, a challenge managers face is knowing which configurations promote better project outcomes when working with virtual software teams. This article reveals a set of configurations that have promoted the quality of software products developed by virtual teams to support the business of a Fortune 500 large IT multinational company. These configurations can be used as a guideline by managers to set up their own virtual teams. Recommendations on how to set up virtual teams based on the study are then suggested.

Professional software products and IT systems and services today are developed mostly by globally distributed teams, projects, and companies. Successfully orchestrating Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the major success factor both for organizations and practitioners. Yet, more than a half of all distributed projects does not achieve the intended objectives and is canceled. This paper summarizes experiences from academia and industry in a way to facilitate knowledge and technology transfer. It is based on an evaluation of 10 years of research, and industry collaboration and experience reported at the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICGSE) series. The outcomes of our analysis show GSE as a field highly attached to industry and, thus, a considerable share of ICGSE papers address the transfer of Software Engineering concepts and solutions to the global stage. We found collaboration and teams, processes and organization, sourcing and supplier management, and success factors to be the topics gaining the most interest of researchers and practitioners. Beyond the analysis of the past conferences, we also look at current trends in GSE to motivate further research and industrial collaboration.

Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS) is an emerging area in Software Engineering (SE). It has a dynamic nature in which problems are opened up to crowds of people through an open call to solve problems with the incentive of prizes for the best solutions. Although SW CS has been increasingly adopted in the software industry, many open issues are still to be elucidated. For instance, collaboration aspects are one of those issues. They impact communication and coordination practices. This study aims to identify barriers to collaboration in SW CS and communication practices that might help overcome these barriers. We identified the barriers and practices from a qualitative data analysis study considering an available literature review report. Our study contributes to the SE area by providing insights for researchers, tool designers, and managers that might help them to better understand collaboration issues and proposed solutions to solve them.

Distributed Software Development (DSD) has been discussed by industry and academia for almost two decades now, and, as consequence, there is a large number of empirical scientific papers and industrial reports on it. However, the description of the context in which the empirical study was conducted is not always clear or complete, making the process of searching for empirical evidence burdensome. It becomes difficult to understand or to judge the relevance of study given that DSD scenarios are diverse. What works in one context might not apply to another. To reduce such difficulty, we need, as a research community, to have means to standardize how we report empirical studies and their findings aiming to make them more readily available to practitioners and researchers. In this paper we present an extended taxonomy to classify empirical DSD evidence. We conducted an expert opinion survey with researchers and practitioners to identify elements to compose the taxonomy. Preliminary evaluation of the proposed taxonomy suggests that it can be used to synthesize existing knowledge, to identify gaps in literature, to identify related work and to help researchers who will publish or review further empirical work, as well as practitioners who are interested in published empirical studies.

Software is created for and with a wide range of stakeholders, from customers to management, from value-added providers to customer service personnel. These stakeholders work with teams of software engineers to develop and evolve software systems that support their activities. All of these people and their interactions are central to software development. Thus, it is crucial to investigate the dynamic and frequently changing Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), both before and after deployment, in order to understand current software practices, processes, and tools. In turn, this enables us to design tools and support mechanisms that improve software creation, software maintenance, and customer communication.Researchers and practitioners have long recognized the need to investigate these aspects, however, their articles are scattered across conferences and communities. This workshop will provide a unified forum for discussing high quality research studies, models, methods, and tools for human and cooperative aspects of software engineering. This will be the 8th in a series of workshops, which continue to be a meeting place for the academic, industrial, and practitioner communities interested in this area, and will give opportunities to present and discuss works-in-progress.

Context] Many software projects fail due to problems in requirements engineering (RE).[Objective] The goal of this paper is to gather information on relevant RE problems and to represent knowledge on their most common causes.[Method] We replicated a global family of RE surveys in Brazil and used the data to identify critical RE problems and to build probabilistic causeeffect diagrams to represent knowledge on their common causes.[Results] The survey was answered by 74 different organizations, including small, medium and very large sized companies, conducting both, plan-driven and agile development.The most critical RE problems, according to those organizations, are related to communication and to incomplete or underspecified requirements.We provide the full probabilistic cause-effect diagrams with knowledge on common causes of the most critical identified RE problems online.[Conclusion] We believe that the knowledge presented in the diagrams can be helpful to support organizations in conducting causal analysis sessions by providing an initial understanding on what usually causes critical RE problems.

Agile software development (ASD) has become an important research topic.However, despite the increase in the number of studies in this area in the last few years, there is a lack of structured information about its adoption in the public sector.Since the public sector is the part of the economy concerned with providing various government services, the goal of this study is to report from a systematic literature review and provide information that may enhance the understanding of the implications of adopting ASD within public companies.As the main results, we found that ASD could indeed be adopted in the public sector.The analysis suggests that a good alternative is to start the adoption of ASD with people willing to change -strongly supported by senior management -working on important pilotprojects.Second, we found that job satisfaction is greater when adopting agile methods within public companies.Finally, we also found some barriers that are difficult to overcome, including the ingrained use of plan-drive methods, as well as big bang deliveries and lack of experience in ASD.

Usability inspections can be employed in early phases of the software development process.They improve usability through artifacts that are built during the development of the software.These artifacts will influence the usability of the developed software.Usability inspection techniques have been proposed and considered as an effective alternative for addressing usability issues in early phases.However, these techniques are often avoided by software engineers due to their lack of experience and knowledge in the field.Therefore, there is an opportunity to investigate how industry practitioners have employed an early usability inspection technique in practice.This paper describes an observational study in the industry aimed at eliciting the process used by software engineers when applying an early usability inspection technique.We analyzed the qualitative data, discussing their impact in the improvement of the technique.The results indicated which steps the software engineers adopted in the technique's application.

The importance of planning and management skills in software development is very difficult to convey in software engineering courses. We present the synopsis of an assignment whose purpose is to demonstrate the significance of such skills, including effective communication, team coordination and collaboration, and overall project planning. The assignment is organized in the context of a distributed software engineering course carried out in collaboration with 12 universities in South America, Europe and Africa. The assignment is a globally distributed contest issued before most development activities related to the course's software project are performed, aiming at favoring the collaboration between students prior to project development. The contest does not involve any programming, and is not related to the project development activities. Instead, it consists of making teams in different countries compete in collaboratively solving a set of very simple tasks. The complexity of the activity is in team collaboration and coordination, and their lack is evident when the tasks are not correctly solved, or not solved in time. Despite the simplicity of the as-signment, students have found it useful in helping them understand the significance of management and planning challenges in distributed software development. Moreover, the assignment helped in team building, by creating a better team atmosphere and contributing in identifying team members better suited for management.

Context: Real-time speech translation technology is today available but still lacks a complete understanding of how such technology may affect communication in global software projects.

Communication in global software projects usually occurs between native and non-native English speakers with the drawback of an unequal ability to fully understand and contribute to discussions. In this paper, we investigate the adoption of combining speech recognition and machine translation in order to overcome language barriers among stakeholders who are remotely negotiating software requirements. We report our findings from a simulated study where stakeholders communicate speaking three different languages with the help of the Google mobile speech translation service.

Global software companies are restructuring their IT area by extending operations to offshore software development centers. Thus, follow-the-sun (FTS) development is seen as a potential software development strategy for these companies. But so far, FTS is relatively understudied (only nine empirical studies published). Moreover, the success cases of FTS usage in the software industry are still small. The lack of studies to close the gap between theory and practice is observed as the main barrier to the FTS evolution. In this study, we present a framework to support research on FTS software development. The proposed framework aims to support empirical studies and meta-analysis on FTS. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we propose an initial framework for researching FTS software development, including independent, dependent and context variables. Additionally, we discuss research challenges, and directions for future research. Our paper aims to provide both a guide and motivation for researchers to better understand how to research FTS and to develop new theories in the area.

Trust is an integral element of any collaboration. We sought to investigate the interplay among trust, risk, and reliance within the context of Global Systems Engineering (GSE) teams. To this end, we conducted an empirical study of individuals' processes and considerations when presented with hypothetical scenarios that required long-term and short-term commitments, in addition to relinquishing control to others in their team. In this paper, we present the results of our 1-1 interviews of 57 individuals collaborating in GSE teams within five organizations. Our results suggest that study participants often readily trust their peers and those higher in the organizational hierarchy when no long-term commitment is required, and the participant retains control of the scenario. Our study findings also suggest that this finding does not necessarily extend to scenarios in which their decision entailed loss of control and thus higher risk and reliance. Our investigation of an individual's decision-making processes and the influence of trust on these processes provide us with insights that can be used to refine GSE managers' strategies and guide future research.

Brazil has been emerging as an offshore destination for offshore IT software and services. The country already had a strong domestic base of IT clients to global companies. One of the competitive factors is time zone location. Brazil has now positioned itself as easy for collaboration because of time zone overlap with its primary partners in North America and Europe. In this paper we examine whether time zone proximity is indeed an advantage for software development by conducting a country-level field study of the Brazilian IT industry using a cross section of firms. The results provide some support for the claims of proximity benefits. The Brazil-to-North dyads use moderate timeshifting that is perceived as comfortable and advantageous for both sides of these dyads. The voice coordination that the time overlap permits helps address coordination challenges and foster relationships. These and other practices relating to time zones are described in detail.

Trust remains a challenge in globally distributed development teams. In order to investigate how trust plays out in this context, we conducted a qualitative study of 5 multi-national IT organizations. We interviewed 58 individuals across 10 countries and made two principal findings. First, study participants described trust in terms of their expectations of their colleagues. These expectations fell into one of three dimensions: that socially correct behavior will persist, that team members possess technical competency, and that individuals will demonstrate concern for others. Second, our study participants described trust as a dynamic process, with phases including formation, dissolution, adjustment and restoration. We provide new insights into these dimensions and phases of trust within distributed teams which extend existing literature. Our study also provides guidelines on effective practices within distributed teams in addition to providing implications for the extension of software engineering and collaboration tools.

Communication and collaboration skills are very important for Software Engineering practitioners. The practitioner who possesses these skills, as well as solid technical knowledge, will possibly perform his activities in a more efficient way. Generally, people acquire these skills through experience. However what can happen when we emphasize training this kind of skills during Software Engineering courses? Practitioners might get better prepared to the market expectations in lesser time, which could reduce training costs in the industry. In this paper we present an observational study aiming to allow a better understanding on how can communication and collaboration skills be improved by using Distributed Software Development (DSD). In the literature, we found previous researches that indicate a relationship between DSD and the improvement of skills. We use these researches as basis for our study. After a qualitative analysis of the data, we identified that, in the context of our experiment, the use of DSD in classroom accelerated the adoption of communication and collaboration practices and it can improve these skills.

Trust is generally considered a key element of effective and productive distributed team collaborations. In this paper, we report the results of our investigation into the factors that engender trust in Global Systems Engineering (GSE) teams in five multinational organizations. We extend our previous work by conducting a new field study focused solely on factors that engender trust and identify the implications of these factors. Our work provides significant contributions to practitioners, researchers and tool developers. Managers working in study field sites have confirmed that our findings will be used to inform future team management strategies. Our results can also be used to structure and guide future research in this field, as it identifies gaps in existing literature. Finally, our findings can be used to inform the development of future tools that aim to support collaborative work in general and GSE teams specifically.

An adequate task allocation plan is an effective strategy to reduce collaboration issues in distributed software development. Practitioners adopt distinct processes to allocate tasks as well as diverse labels for the same activities and artifacts. This diversity is also found in literature. Task allocation proposals consider different elements and use distinct names for the same concepts. The lack of a standardized vocabulary and of an understanding of the elements involved impairs knowledge acquisition and sharing. Our paper presents a domain ontology to represent concepts related to task allocation in distributed teams. The ontology was defined based on a literature systematic mapping and on the opinion of experts. Preliminary evaluation suggests that the relationships among concepts are valid in real projects. The ontology brings awareness to managers regarding the factors related to task allocation planning and provides researchers with a framework to define processes and design tools to support such activity.

Software engineering project courses where student teams are geographically distributed can effectively simulate the problems of globally distributed software development (DSD). However, this pedagogical model has proven difficult to adopt or sustain. It requires significant pedagogical resources and collaboration infrastructure. Institutionalizing such courses also requires compatible and reliable teaching partners. The purpose of this workshop is to continue building on our outreach efforts to foster a community of international faculty and institutions committed to developing, teaching and researching DSD. Foundational materials presented will include pedagogical materials and infrastructure developed and used in teaching DSD courses along with results and lessons learned. The third CTGDSD workshop will also focus on publishing workshop results and collaborating with the larger DSD community. Longrange goals include: lowering adoption barriers by providing common pedagogical materials, collaboration infrastructure, and a pool of potential teaching partners from around the globe.

Brazil has been emerging as a destination for IT software and services. The country already had a strong domestic base of IT clients to global companies. One of the competitive factors is time zone location. Brazil has positioned itself as easy for collaboration because of time zone overlap with its primary partners in North America and Europe. In this paper we examine whether time zone proximity is an advantage for software development by conducting a country-level field study of the Brazilian IT industry using a cross section of firms. The results provide some support for the claims of proximity benefits. The Brazil-North dyads use moderate timeshifting that is perceived as comfortable for both sides. The voice coordination that the time overlap permits helps address coordination challenges and foster relationships. One company, in particular, practiced such intense time zone aligned collaboration using agile methods that we labeled this Real-time Simulated Co-location.

Software is created by people for people working in a range of environments and under various conditions. Understanding the cooperative and human aspects of software development is crucial in order to comprehend how methods and tools are used, and thereby improve the creation and maintenance of software. Both researchers and practitioners have recognized the need to investigate these aspects, but the results of such investigations are dispersed in different conferences and communities. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussing high quality research on human and cooperative aspects of software engineering. We aim to provide both a meeting place for the community and the possibility for researchers interested in joining the field to present and discuss their work in progress and to get an overview over the field.

Background: Understanding how to successfully deal with human and technical aspects involved in Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs is a challenging issue. Technical aspects are not enough to guarantee the success of activities. Human factors (e.g., experiences, opinions and perceptions) impact the effectiveness of SPI programs. Aim: this paper aims to improve our current understanding on how human aspects can influence SPI programs from the point of view of the professionals involved in such efforts. We compare our findings with the results of previous studies in order to analyze the different contexts in which human aspects influence SPI. Method: We conducted a qualitative study in the context of small companies involved in SPI programs in Amazonas State in Brazil based on the Brazilian Maturity Model - MPS.BR. We used semi-structural interviews with software engineers. Results: We identified findings about eleven of the fourteen investigated human aspects. We identified new characteristics that motivate actors to get involved in SPI programs. Finally, while previous research indicated that the process of individual decision making as a negative aspect, we identified this as a positive aspect. Conclusions: Despite the differences in companies' size and maturity models, our findings corroborate many of the important results of previous case studies. The consistency of the presented results with previous research in different organizations, teams, and countries suggest that these results are true for software engineering in general. However, there were differences related to the motivating factors and the perception of the individual decision making. In our study, we observed that the personality, perception and employee selection aspects were also significant to the SPI program's success. This has not been re

Opportunities for global software development are limited in those countries with a lack of English-speaking professionals. Machine translation technology is today available in the form of cross-language web services and can be embedded into multiuser and multilingual chats without disrupting the conversation flow. However, we still lack a thorough understanding of how real-time machine translation may affect communication in global software teams.

SUMMARY In social psychology, propinquity refers to the physical (objective) or psychological (subjective) proximity between people. In this paper, we explore the psychological dimension of propinquity by examining the phenomenon of feeling distant from geographically distributed people, in the context of distributed software teams. The perceived distance is an important challenge faced by distributed teams, and it is frequently based on factors beyond the physical distance, such as communication and cultural differences. The purpose of this paper is to present a model to assess and make more visible the construct of ‘perceived distance’ among members of global software engineering teams. The model was applied in three real‐world cases to assess its effectiveness in uncovering hidden and useful information during the project lifecycle. The practical experience lived with the quantification of perceived distance gave us good indication that this data can benefit the practice of global software engineering. In most of the projects evaluated, project managers were not expecting the results found. We present the model, details of its applications, analysis of the results, lessons learned and practical implications for the management of distributed software projects and teams. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT Distributed software development (DSD) has intensified over the past few years, and DSD project management is more complex than collocated project management. However, no systematic research effort has focused on aggregating evidence from the scientific literature to build models to support project management on DSD context. For these reasons, the goal of this paper is to build an evidence‐based model of DSD project management from the research findings about challenges of DSD and the practices, models and tools proposed and used to overcome these challenges. We based the construction of this model on the evidence collected and synthesized by a comprehensive systematic mapping study of 70 research papers published between 1997 and 2009. We believe that our results can help practitioners and researchers to better understand the challenges and implement more effective solutions to improve project management within distributed project management teams. These results also provide a mapping of the research about DSD project management, identifying areas where further research is needed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Requirements engineering is a communication-intensive activity and thus it suffers much from language difficulties in global software projects. Remote requirements meetings can benefit from machine translation as this technology is today available in the form of cross-language chat services. In this paper, we present the design of a controlled experiment to investigate the effects of automatic machine translation services in requirements meetings. Experiment participants, using either Italian or Portuguese as native language, are asked to interact with a communication tool from a distance in order to prioritize and estimate requirements. First results show that real-time machine translation is not disruptive of the conversation flow and is accepted with favor by participants. However, concrete effects are expected to emerge when language barriers are critical.

Several organizations that develop software in global scale face issues related to coordination, communication and culture. The Follow-the-Sun (FTS) strategy is a type of global development with the purpose of reducing the duration of the project development and hence, increases productivity. However, FTS is not easy and it is not well discussed in the literature, with few studies discussing challenges and research opportunities. In order to promote a better understanding of FTS, this paper presents the state of the art about FTS, as well as the challenges and research opportunities, helping others in the planning of future studies in this area.

Global Software Development (GSD) has intensified over the past years. Many reasons drove this development practice rise, where reducing development costs can be highlighted. In this context, software development effort estimation plays a very important role to achieve this goal of reducing costs. Once the effort required to develop software is a key component of the cost of development, the correct application of effort estimation techniques is crucial for the success of these projects. However, the current set of effort estimation techniques and models have been used without a clear definition of what has to be different when such techniques or models are used in the context of GSD projects. This paper presents preliminary results towards the understanding of effort estimation in GSD projects. The results found indicate that the teams don't have clear criteria to guide the selection of an effort estimation technique for a certain project. In addition, we can not correlate the effort estimation technique being used and the number of locations involved in a distributed project.

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the challenges, best practices, models, and tools in Distributed Software Development (DSD) Project Management. The objective is to collect and systematize reported knowledge in terms of what are the difficulties in managing DSD projects, what are the best practices to overcome these difficulties, and how existing models and tools support these practices. We found 54 works related to DSD project management, published between 1998 and 2009. Using the data systematically extracted from these works, we propose an evidence-based DSD project management improvement model. Our contention is that this model can support practitioners and researchers to better understand the landscape of DSD project challenges and devise more effective solutions to improve project management in a distributed setting.

This is the introduction of the 3rd workshop on Software Development Governance (SDG), which will take place as part of ICSE 2010. This year we have combined two successful workshops (SDG - software development governance and LMSA -- leadership and management in software architecture) since both workshops deal with decisions that are part of the development process e.g., business and organizational decisions that impact the technical decisions concerned with the product architecture and the product quality.

In social psychology, propinquity refers to the physical (objective) or psychological (subjective) proximity between people. In this paper, we explore the psychological dimension of propinquity, by examining the phenomenon of feeling distant from geographically distributed people, in the context of distributed software teams. The lack of perceived distance is an important challenge faced by distributed teams, and it is frequently caused by factors beyond the physical distance, such as communication and cultural differences. The purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the usage of an innovative model to quantitatively evaluate the perceived distance in this context. The model was applied in a software development project with teams located in India and Brazil, and feedback was given by experts in the field. We present the model, details of its applications, analysis of the results, lessons learned, and practical implications for the management of distributed software projects and teams.

Global companies that experimented extensive waterfall phased plans are trying to improve their existing processes to expedite team engagement. SCRUM has become an acceptable path to follow for those companies because it comprises project management as part of its practices. SCRUM has been used with the objective of simplifying project control through simple processes, easy to update documentation and higher team iteration over exhaustive documentation. Instead of investing team effort on producing static documentation, SCRUM proposes to focus on team continuous improvement aiming to add value to business processes. The purpose of this industry report is to describe two projects that experimented SCRUM practices within a globally distributed company. This company has development centers across North America, South America and Asia. This report covers challenges faced by the project teams, strengths and practical recommendations of using SCRUM in a globally distributed environment.

In this paper, we describe a preliminary capability model that captures patterns of evolution in the practice of distributed software development in internal offshoring projects. In our research we seek to understand how the practices of organizations involved in the internal offshoring of software development evolve over time, from a software engineering perspective, and from the point of view of the subsidiaries. Based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we propose a capability model that encompasses the evolution of software development activities within and among several subsidiaries owned by an organization.

Global software engineering is a reality in today's software development industry. With the fast development of this area, it is also necessary to better prepare software development professionals to develop software when located in distributed settings. In this paper, we present an experience of corporate training initiatives related to distributed development in a multinational company with global operations. We have interviewed and collected qualitative data from 39 employees aiming at the identification of challenges and the improvement of their distributed development skills. The results show an interesting profile indicating the existence of a distance between technical and non-technical knowledge, mainly in the beginning of a globally distributed operation. Based on these profiles, we present recommendations to reduce the distance and to manage risks associated with the lack of skill in this scenario.

Distributed Software Development involves a number of different business models, and companies intending to embark on the journey of distributed development have difficulty choosing the model(s) that suits their process and current software practice. More literature that presents similarities as well as differences among these models, in terms of processes, practices and challenges that characterize them, is thus becoming critical to software practitioners. This paper intends to bring more knowledge in this direction. We present empirical evidence from a case study of DSD practice in five companies that had projects following one or more of the different DSD business models described in the literature. We discuss the similarities and differences in the challenges faced by the projects in these models, as well as the relationship between the models, development process, and project size and complexity, as reported in the projects studied.

Global software development not only enables lower operational costs, but makes it possible for companies to have an organizational branch which can drive standardization across all IT segments. Dell Inc global development services took off in 2001 and since then has expanded to Brazil, two centers in India, and one center in Russia. For six years these centers were to some extent independent, and performed the role of a software development consulting/factory inside Dell. Now, the global development centers have migrated to a business centric model, on which they are no longer a separate structure, but directly bound to the IT segments of each business area. The purpose of this paper is to show the evolution of the internal offshore software development model adopted by Dell and the results achieved by this endeavor.

The purpose of this paper is to present a reference model for global software development, based on the results found in a case study conducted in two software development units from multinational organizations located in Brazil. A preliminary description of this model was originally published in 2004. In this paper, we present the reference model in detail, improving the description and discussing the factors that enable multinationals corporations to operate successfully across geographic and cultural boundaries. At the end, we also discuss a preliminary evaluation of the reference model usage.

The purpose of this paper is to present the MuNDDoS Research Group, located at PUCRS University, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This group was created in 2001, and since then is conducting several research projects on Global Software Development in Brazil, collaborating with research groups from other universities in Brazil and other countries. We present the research group goals, some of the projects developed, and the current projects.

Global software development projects are passing through the boundaries of a company or a country. In order to manage global teams effectively, it is necessary to define a software process adapted to different organizational cultures. A global software process gives all team members a common language to define tasks and activities allowing the better understanding of the business domain terms and the project milestones in spite of their differences in terms of culture and organizational structures. This paper presents the practices adopted to define a global software process for a distributed environment and the factors that impacted in the process definition