Descriptive Analysis of Fear and Distrust in Early Phases of GSD Projects

When globally distributed software development (GSD) is understood as knowledge intensive collaborative work, many of the reasons for problems encountered in GSD projects can be traced back to social conditions framing the collaboration between people at onsite and offsite. A total of 59 interviews were conducted in 8 GSD projects of two major software companies located in Finland. As a result of categorization of problems related to group relations in GSD projects, the lack of trust between onsite and offsite and fears of losing jobs at onsite was found as major problems in the early phases of the projects. Our analysis suggests that poorly communicated reasons GSD can cause severe problems in collaboration between people by laying the ground for fears and for distrust between sites. The study contributes to the GSD research by creating a novel empirical description of the linkages between fear and distrust in GSD.