This paper systematically reviewed 46 publications on the impact of global dispersion on software development coordination, team performance, and quality. It found that geographical dispersion can decrease communication and increase coordination challenges. Cultural dispersion often causes misunderstandings while temporal dispersion introduces time lags. Uneven work distributions across locations also negatively impacted quality. However, temporal dispersion was also found to increase development speed in some cases. The paper discusses implications for managers in balancing costs and coordination challenges of dispersed teams.

1. “The impact of global dispersion on
coordination, team performance and
software quality – A systematic
literature review”
Anh Nguyen-Duc, Daniela S. Cruzes, Reidar Conradi

2. Abstract:
Context:
Global software development (GSD) contains different context
setting dimensions, which are essential for effective teamwork and
success of projects.
Objective:
This paper summarizes empirical evidence on the impact of
global dispersion dimensions on coordination, team
performance and project outcomes.
Method:
We performed a systematic literature review of 46 publications
from 25 journals and 19 conference and workshop proceedings,
which were published between 2001 and 2013.

3. INTRODUCTION:
• Software development and maintenance tasks are continually dispersing
globally for
 cost saving,
 time-to-market shortening,
 technology innovation and
 operational efficiency
• A large amount of empirical research has been devoted to understand general
challenges.
 managing collaboration
 getting requirements
 establishing trust
 communication and coordination
 engineering process in GSD.

4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
• RQ1: How are dispersion dimensions defined and measured
in GSD studies?
• RQ2: What are different coordination challenges that
dispersion dimensions present to GSD project outcomes?
• RQ3: How does dispersion dimensions affect team
performance in GSD project?
• RQ4: How does software quality affect software quality in
GSD project?

5. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:
The complete review lasted for 23 months, including six main steps:
1. Ad-hoc review
2. Pilot search
3. Systematic search & Extraction
4. Additional Manual Search
5. Quality Assessment
6. Data Analysis

6. REVIEW PROTOCOL:
1. Search terms
Search string consisted of 3 parts:
(Coordination Or synonyms) AND (Dispersion Or synonyms)
AND context.
• The ad-hoc review revealed that there was no distinguished
use of terms ‘‘coordination,’’ ‘‘collaboration’’ and
‘‘cooperation’’
• Consequently, a list of related terms was identified:
distributed, distribution, dispersed, dispersion, remote,
offshoring, offshore,outsourcing, outsource, nearshore, and
global.

7. 2. Search Database:
Scopus, ISI Web of Science, IEEE Explore, Current Contents,
Kluwer Online, Computer Data-base, Science Direct, Springer
Link, Inspec and ACM Digital Library

8. 3. Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria:
We included papers that:
• Report studies in GSD context
• Explore one of the global dispersion dimensions and relate them to
either team coordination or a specific type of project
outcomes.
We excluded papers that:
• Investigate team performance or quality in GSD context, but not
explicitly address the relationship between coordination or global
dispersions and project outcomes.
• Investigate team coordination in other domains, such as business,
education science and system engineering.
• Provide a conceptual framework or model about coordination that
results from literature reviews or author’s thoughts without
empirical validation.

9. Measurement Scale:
• an issue is not mentioned at all (score 0),
• little mentioned (score 1),
• adequately addressed (score 2)
• completely addressed (score 3).
• average quality score equal or greater than 1

11. 5. Data Analysis:
• A tailor thematic synthesis was conducted.
• Identified the relevant codes from the data extraction form.
• Selected the relevant piece of text and labeled them.
• We applied C4.5 algorithm to build a classification tree
of impact direction based on these context factors

13. RQ1: How are dispersion dimensions defined and measured in GSD studies?

14. RQ2: What are different coordination challenges that dispersion
dimensions present to GSD project outcomes?
DIMENSIONS CHALLANGES
Geographical
dispersion
• decrease of communication frequency,
• difficulty in finding relevant stakeholders
Temporal
dispersion
• leads to time lag in communicating tasks
• difficulty in scheduling meetings and
• limited ability to communicate
Cultural
dispersion
• largest issue is misinterpretation during all types of
development activity: communication, requirement, elicitation,
development, maintenance, and testing.
• understanding of requirements
• knowledge sharing between the client and vendor teams.
• Organizations are not ready to change their internal structure and
processes along with new partners.
Coordination
dispersion
• harder to divide tasks and to assign responsibility across sites than in a
homogeneous environment.
• difficult for team members in identifying roles and responsibilities.
• create conflicts.

15. Reference Geographical, cultural, temporal & coordination
Dispersion
Cramton et al.
(2005)
• surveyed 218 team members from 39 dispersed teams and showed
that teams with geographically dispersed members report significantly
less effective performance than collocated teams
Espinosa et al.
(2007)
• geographic dispersion and team size have a negative impact on team
performance. this impact is mediated by team familiarity.
• Without team familiarity, geographically dispersed team members
need to bridge the geographical distance to coordinate their work
• making it more difficult to work together because of lacking presence
awareness, frequent communication, and contextual reference.
RQ3: How does dispersion dimensions affect team performance in
GSD project?

16. References Cont….
Gopal et al.
(2011)
• surveyed 83 projects in 9 firms and found that temporal dispersion is
positively associated with development speed.
• The study stated that ‘‘follow-the-sun’’ practices allow managers to
leverage 24 h work-day.
• As time separation is larger, i.e., India and the US vs. India and
Singapore, the team has more advantages in productivity.
Ramasubbu et
al. (2008, 2011)
According to the authors,
a ten-person project team configured as 8–2 between New York
City and Bangalore is more productive than 6–4 and 5–5 configurations
Ramasubbu et
al. (2011)
• investigated 362 GSD projects from four organizations and showed that
geographical distance leads to higher productivity.
• collaboration between a pair of developers is delayed, in project level,
firms gain benefits from being distributed

17. RQ4: How does software quality affect software quality in GSD
project?
References Geographical dispersion
Bird et al.
(2009)
• Microsoft Windows Vista project and found that there is no
significantly correlation between different degree of geographical
distribution and software quality
Bird et al.
(2012)
• Firefox and Eclipse and found that all geographical distribution
measure increase number of failure at file level.
• In Firefox case, distribution measures are more significant during
prior to release than after.
• Higher values of spatial and worldwide distribution were
associated with more defects in both prior to both releases .
• In the Eclipse case, there are also a mixed finding when all
measures of geographic and organizational distribution increased
failures, but the effects are not consistent across releases
Cataldo et al.
(2009)
• investigated 562 components from GSD projects and found
that an increase in distances among locations leads to an increase
of number of defects

18. References Temporal dispersion
Cataldo et al.
(2010)
• components that are developed by a team with a higher level of
temporal dispersion exhibited lower levels of quality.
• However, the authors did not find a significant relationship
between temporal dispersion and software quality at the project level
Colazo et al.
(2011)
• investigated 100 projects and found that a higher temporal
dispersion is associated with fewer defects and subsequently with a
higher quality of coding.
• the positive effect of temporal boundary on quality is greater in
more complex tasks.

19. Work dispersion:
• a ten-person project team configured as 8–2
between New York City and Bangalore is more
defect prone than 6–4 and 5–5 teams do
• Uneven distribution of work items, i.e.
modification request, across development
locations negatively impacted software
quality.

20. Summary:

21. Future Work:
(1) coordination challenges in inter-organizational projects,
(2) Impact of processes and practices mismatches on project
outcomes,
(3) evolution of coordination needs and mechanism over time and
(4) impact of dispersion dimensions on open source project out-
comes.
For GSD managers
(1) the tradeoff between cost and benefits while dispersing tasks,
(2) alignment impact of dispersion dimensions with individual and
organizational objectives,
(3) coordination mechanisms as situational approaches
(4) collocation of development activities of high quality demand
components