How Social Software supports communicative and coordinative Practices in Global Software Development

lobal Software Development (GSD) is increasingly becoming a common practice in the software industry. In GSD, the lack of face-to-face communication is a major challenge, and effective computer-mediated practices are necessary. Communication through Social Software (SoSo) seems to be able to support team coordination and help to deal with geographical distance; however, research in the field is at an early stage. This PhD thesis investigates the use of SoSo in three GSD projects, highlighting the usage of SoSo to overcome the lack of face-to-face communication and the role of SoSo within the ecology of channels used by the teams.
Three ethnographically-inspired studies were conducted during this PhD project. Data collection techniques are similar in the different projects, including direct observations, interviews, and document analysis, while data analysis was performed using different conceptual tools in the different phases of this PhD project. In particular, from the analysis of the field material performed in the initial part of this PhD, the necessity to describe observed practices with appropriate conceptual tools emerged. Thus, a conceptual framework based on the concepts of coordination mechanisms and communicative genres was developed in the final part of this PhD, not only to analyze and describe the role of SoSo in a GSD project, but also to show how coordinative and communicative practices are established and maintained in GSD teams.
This PhD thesis highlights the role of SoSo as a flexible tool that can be used by GSD teams as a side channel to complement collaborative Software Engineering tools that provide templates for coordination mechanisms. SoSo can support different communicative genres, including work discussions, knowledge sharing, team building and articulation work. SoSo appears to be suitable to establish, develop, and maintain social protocols during the collaboration, assuming a central role in the ecology of channels used by team members. SoSo enables team building chats and metawork, both of which are necessary for establishing successful collaboration that deals with geographical distance. Providing distributed teams the access to flexible tools, such as SoSo, and allowing social talk through SoSo influence the effective usage of coordination mechanisms, resulting in the success of the collaboration.