Software development teams are increasingly global. Team members are separated by multiple boundaries such as geographic location, time zone, culture, and organization, presenting substantial coordination challenges. Global software development becomes even more challenging when user requirements change dynamically. However, little empirical research has investigated how team dispersion across multiple boundaries and user requirements dynamism, which collectively increase task environment complexity, influence team coordination and software development success in the global context. Further, we have a limited understanding of how software process capabilities such as rigor, standardization, agility, and customizability mitigate the negative effects of global team dispersion and user requirements dynamism. To address these important issues, we test a set of relevant hypotheses using field survey data obtained from both project managers and stakeholders. Our results show that global team dispersion and user requirements dynamism have a negative effect on coordination effectiveness. We find that the negative effect of global team dispersion on coordination effectiveness decreases as process standardization increases and that the negative effect of user requirements dynamism on coordination effectiveness decreases as process agility increases. We find that coordination effectiveness has a positive effect on global software development success in terms of both process and product aspects.

We often hear that global software engineering teams are affected by time differences. While there is considerable research on the difficulties of distance, culture and other dimensions, there has been little research that isolated the impact of just time differences. The research question that guides us is whether there are gradual differences across time zones that impact team performance. In this study we conducted a laboratory experiment with 42 dyadic teams. The teams were randomly assigned into 4 time zone overlap conditions: full overlap, 2/3 overlap, 1/3 overlap and no overlap. Using a fictional map task, we found that participants' perceptions of process are unrelated to actual objective performance measures of speed and accuracy. Consistent with our expectations, we found that a small time separation has no effect on accuracy, but that more time separation has a significant effect on accuracy. Also consistent with our expectations, we found that a small amount of time separation has a significant effect on production speed. However, contrary to our expectations, we found that further increases in partial overlap have less significant effects on speed, and when there is no overlap speed actually increases, albeit not significantly - a "U-shaped" effect.

This paper presents an awareness tool designed to help distributed, asynchronous groups solve problems quickly. Using a lab study, it was found that groups that used the awareness tool tended to converge and agree upon a solution more quickly. However, it was also found that individuals who did not use the awareness tool got closer to the correct solution. Implications for the design of awareness tools are discussed, with particular attention paid to the importance of matching the features of an awareness tool with a workgroup's tasks and goals.