Reflecting the Choice and Usage of Communication Tools in GSD Projects with Media Synchronicity Theory

Global software development projects use a variety of communication media, such as teleconferences, email and instant messaging to overcome the challenges caused by the distances. Each communication media has different properties and capabilities to mediate the communication on different software engineering tasks. The use of different tools imply different communication practices. In this paper, we report our findings on communication in twelve distributed software projects: which communication tools were used, how they were used, and how communication tool use was related to different tasks in the project studied. We analyze the tool use and articulated rationale for choosing the communication tools for various tasks in distributed software development based on communicative processes and medium properties. We found evidence supporting applicability of media synchronicity theory in selecting communication tools for GSD projects.