Impact of changing communication media on conflict resolution in distributed software development projects

Distributed software development (DSD) is a setting in which geographically distributed software teams develop software. Communication plays a critical role in conflict resolution in DSD projects. Different communication media such as email, phone, instant messaging etc. are used during conflict resolution. We investigated the impact of changing sequence of communication media on conflict resolution during requirements engineering in DSD setting. A controlled experiment was conducted, in DSD setting, to see whether changing the sequence of communication media impacts conflict resolution or not? Five teams were made comprising of students from two different universities for the experiment wherein the customer team was from one university and development team from the other university. The results of the experiment show that changing sequence of communication media impacts conflict resolution. We also report in this paper the effective sequence of communication media for conflict resolution in a DSD project.