Globally distributed software development using an immersive virtual environment

Increasingly, business pressures drive development projects toward global development in which the systems and software development team is distributed over two or more geographical locations. Co-location allows improved communication, confidence, familiarity, and trust that facilitate rapid information sharing, mentoring, problem resolution, and so on. Previous observations indicate that improving the speed and cost of software development while distributing it across a global team requires remediation, likely the acquisition and deployment of collaboration technology. This paper describes an ongoing corporate experiment aimed at improving collaborative software development that is increasingly spread over 4 continents, 7 countries, and over 20 regional facilities. It involves the use of an immersive networked virtual environment (NVE) for the development of aviation electronics.