Knowledge scouts: Reducing communication barriers in a distributed software development project

As a result of globalization, mergers, acquisitions, and scarce skills, software development is becoming increasingly distributed. Distribution, however, introduces major communication barriers, including time zone differences, cultural differences, and most project participants have never met face to face. In this paper, we focus on "knowledge scouts," developers who travel briefly to other sites and report to their home base what they have discovered and learned. With a case study we show how knowledge scouts can overcome many communication issues. We propose that the research focus should be on the simpler problem of supporting a small mobile group of developers as a means of addressing the inherent communication obstacles in distributed software projects.