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Volume 5 Issue 4
Barcelona 2007
Knowledge Work Practices in Global Software Development
Gabriela Avram
University of Limerick, Ireland
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This paper is an exploration of knowledge work practices in a distributed software development setting and is intended to highlight the ways in which technical and social factors are inextricably intertwined in distributed work settings. The objective is to discuss the impact of the global distribution of software development on collaborative work practices and knowledge creation, transfer and retention.
A description of the wider context of Global Software Development with an emphasis on previous Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Knowledge Management studies serves to familiarize the reader with research in the field.
The empirical study presented here has been undertaken in the Irish subsidiary of a multinational company. Over a 16-month period, the author observed the activity of a software development team working on a particular project. The research methods were inspired by ethnography and include observation, document analysis, in-context interviews, audio recordings, focus groups and workshops.
The paper illustrates a number of actual knowledge work practices through some specific examples of collaborative work over distance and discusses these practices using such concepts as mutual knowledge, boundary spanner, and transactive memory. The focus is on the role of human actors, of their values and social connections in dealing with the challenges of distributed work and getting the work done.
The conclusion is that the decisive factor for the success of projects with distributed team members is the human one, supported (or inhibited) by the organizational culture. Tools, although important, play only a secondary role. Despite the current focus of the paper on global software development activities, the author expects the findings to be of interest for people involved in distributed work arrangements in other domains as well.
Keywords:
Knowledge management, social capital, communities of practice, structuration theory
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