An Insight into the Interplay between Culture, Conflict and Distance in Globally Distributed Requirements Negotiations

There is an increasing interest in research addressing issues of global software development. Specifying software requirements is a communication-intensive collaborative activity that is increasingly performed across cultural, language and time zone boundaries. While inadequate communication significantly impacts the bridging of geographical distance between stakeholders, the cultural differences cannot be considered less significant. Findings from two global software development organizations enables us to present a model of impact of distance and the affected requirements activities due to problems of cultural diversity, inadequate communication, knowledge management and time differences. This evidence provides an important insight into the interplay between culture and conflict as well as the impact of distance on the ability to reconcile different viewpoints with regards to requirements and requirements processes. 1. Requirements negotiations in global software development Software engineering is witnessing a transition from the traditional co-located form of development to a form in which global software teams collaborate across national borders. Research increasingly reports about projects developed between USA and India [11] as well as other continents such as Asia and Europe [3]. Findings emphasize major problems in communication and coordination, activities that are critical during early phases of strategic planning, requirements gathering, analysis and negotiation. Requirements Engineering (RE) research in particular has yet to address the challenges faced by multi-site organizations. Previous reports only describe global projects where the requirements gathering and analysis were performed during face-to-face meetings at the client site, and the information communicated to the development staff [16]. It is equally important to understand and describe the impact of distance in projects where cross-functional stakeholder teams define the software requirements in global structures. Global organizations face challenges in enabling effective ongoing communication between headquarters and remote development sites. Although weekly meetings are needed for strategic planning and negotiations of tradeoffs between competing demands, organizations often don’t have the luxury of arranging face-to-face requirements meetings on an ongoing basis. As a result, distance may exacerbate fundamental RE problems such as poor communication among stakeholders, as well as those due to factors of political, organizational and social nature. While recent research investigated distributed requirements negotiations in a controlled setting [6], more evidence about multi-site organizations and RE at a distance needs to be gathered in the software industry. Given the relative novelty of the phenomenon and the paucity of research done in this area, it is important to conduct field investigations to understand the impact of problems of communication and coordination on RE activities, to identify challenges faced by multi-site organizations, and to formulate recommendations to overcome problems associated with distance. Practitioners need to be aware of such findings in order to cope with distance, when co-located development is not an option. In this paper we report the findings of a case study of two multi-site development organizations where groups of customers, product management and engineering specified requirements from remote locations. We describe the challenges faced by the stakeholders in activities such as requirements elicitation, analysis, negotiation and specification. The specific focus of the paper is on an aspect that is gaining increased interest in the literature on global collaboration, i.e. the interplay between conflict and culture in the distributed teams. The paper begins by a description of the research question and methodology in Section 2, followed by background information on the two multi-site organizations in the case study. In Section 4, requirements engineering challenges due to distance are described in the form of a three-layer model. It identifies four known problems of global software development, the specific challenges identified in this study, as well as the requirements engineering activities directly affected by these challenges. A common theme in the evidence from both multi-site organizations is the interplay between conflict, culture and distance in global requirements negotiations, aspect discussed in detail in Section 5. 2. Research Methodology Our research question was “what is the impact of stakeholders’ geographical distribution on RE activities in global software development?” The goal was to understand how requirements were developed in multi-site development organizations; to understand the challenges faced, strategies and technologies used to overcome these challenges. The research method was the case study as described in [22]. The unit of analysis was the multi-site software development organization. The model of impact as well as the evidence about culture and conflict discussed in this paper is grounded in data collected at two multi-site organizations with headquarters in US and development sites in Australia. The organizations names are fictitious to preserve confidentiality. Grounded theory methods [20] (comparative analysis within each organization and between the two organizations) were used to analyze the data. We spent over seven months in the first organization (“Global Development Software”, GDS henceforth), and findings from the first organization were described in [7]. This was followed by a period of five weeks of focused interviews at the second organization (“Software Production International”, SPI henceforth). Continued collaboration with GDS allowed us to return to GDS and compare “backwards” and strengthen our findings to reflect aspects from both organization. One common theme that emerged was the interplay between conflict and culture in the distributed teams. 3. Background information on the two organisations The two organizations were chosen since they provided a similar still different geographical distribution of stakeholders, and thus their comparison could serve to ground theoretical statements about the impact of stakeholders’ geographical distribution on defining requirements in multi-site organizations. The two multi-site software organizations were similar in that the requirements activities involved frequent and significant communication of two major stakeholder groups located on two different continents, Australia and USA. They were different in that at GDS, unlike SPI, there was a long-standing working relationship between the two stakeholder groups, as well as significantly more domain knowledge in product development, shared by the interested parties. GDS has the development located in a major laboratory in Sydney and several other cities in Australia. The Business Management (BM) is located in USA, and customer segments world-wide. Major decisions are taken in weekly meetings involving three to five development management staff in Australia and four US-based BM members. Similarly, at SPI development is located in two major Australian cities and a team of five belong to the Project Office team in one US location, while customers are located in five US locations. These stakeholder groups had not worked together on previous projects. Both organizations have used a mix of communication technologies to support their collaboration over distance, including email, teleconferencing, videoconferencing and NetMeeting. 4. RE challenges due to distance Our findings are described in the form of a model of RE challenges due to geographical distribution of stakeholders, illustrated in Figure 1. In the model, the top layer describes what we identified to be four major problems of geographical distribution of stakeholders. They align with findings of previous research of global software development [11]: • Inadequate communication. Distance introduces barriers to informal and face-to-face communication, and the stakeholders’ communication is dependent on the quality of using synchronous or asynchronous electronic communication tools. In this study, interest groups (customers, business management, and developers) did not communicate effectively and each sought to exert power and influence over the others. • Knowledge management. The sheer quantity of information and knowledge bout requirements from multiple sources at remote customer sites was not appropriately shared with the developers. • Cultural diversity. Differences in stakeholders’ language and national culture affect global collaboration. Equally important in this study was the impact of differences in organizational and functional culture. Not only did remote sites develop their own organizational culture, but also the distance widened the gap between the different functional departments of the organization (marketing, business management, development and engineering). This had a significant impact on achieving a common understanding and negotiation of requirements. • Time difference. The large distribution of stakeholders introduced large time-zone differences and allowed little overlap available for synchronous collaboration. Hence asynchronous channels were predominant in the communication, complemented by regular teleconferencing calls. Synchronous meetings across continents are always awkward for at least one site – either too early or too late in the day, and involve someone having to compromise on their work schedule. These “generic” problems had created specific difficulties in conducting RE activities and they are described in the second layer of the model. These “challenges” were arranged and labeled such to provide a minimum but meaningful array of distinct and yet possibly overlapping categories. They are described in the next sections, one by one (left to right in Figure 1), together with