  In globally distributed projects, virtual teams are often partially
dispersed. One common setup occurs when several members from one company work
with a large outsourcing vendor based in another country. Further, the
introduction of the popular BizDevOps concept has increased the necessity to
cooperate across departments and reduce the age-old disconnection between the
business strategy and technical development. Establishing a good collaboration
in partially distributed BizDevOps teams requires extensive collaboration and
communication techniques. Nowadays, a common approach is to rely on
collaboration through pull requests and frequent communication on Slack. To
investigate barriers for pull requests in distributed teams, we examined an
organization located in Scandinavia where cross-functional BizDevOps teams
collaborated with off-site team members in India. Data were collected by
conducting 14 interviews, observing 23 entire days with the team, and observing
37 meetings. We found that the pull-request approach worked very well locally
but not across sites. We found barriers such as domain complexity, different
agile processes (timeboxed vs. flow-based development), and employee turnover.
Using an intellectual capital lens on our findings, we discuss barriers and
positive and negative effects on the success of the pull-request approach.
