A study of communication and cooperation in distributed software project teams

With a growing demand for software systems and an increase in their complexity, software development and maintenance is no longer the preserve of individual designers and programmers, but is a team-based activity. Indeed, development and maintenance has always involved a wide variety of stakeholders (customers, designers, programmers, maintainers, end-users) making the need for communication and cooperation an inherent characteristic. Changes in support technology, economic factors and globalisation of software development and maintenance is increasingly resulting in the geographical separation of personnel. Where such distribution of personnel occurs, it is clearly important that there is high quality communication and cooperation. This paper presents the results and conclusions from a study of communication and cooperation practices on a range of distributed commercial software projects