Exploring social structures in Extended Team Model

Extended Team Model (ETM) as a type of offshore outsourcing is increasingly becoming popular mode of Global Software Development (GSD). There is little knowledge about the social structures in ETM and their impact on collaboration. Within a large interdisciplinary project to develop the next generation of GSD technologies, we are exploring the role of social structures to support collaboration. This paper reports some details of our research design and initial findings about the mechanisms to support social structures and their impact on collaboration in an ETM.