Developing an Inter-site Coordination Index for Global Software Development

Globally distributed software development teams face extraordinary communication and coordination problems due to spatial, temporal, and cultural separation between team members. Using the dyadic model of coordination, the paper proposes a coordination index that encapsulates the coordination difficulties in global software development. The coordination index is derived from four other indices-coupling index, need index, effectiveness index, and time-zone index. While a discrete-event simulation model is used to determine the time-zone index for all possible temporal separations, two rounds of questionnaire surveys were administered among researchers and practitioners world-wide to determine the need and the effectiveness indices. The important factors affecting inter-site coordination were short-listed after the first round. In the second round, weights were assigned to the short-listed factors by making a pair-wise comparison between them. The paper also demonstrates how the coordination index, so derived, can be used for a few project planning decisions.