Organizational Aspects of Distributed Software Development

Software production has become an industrial task usually involving teams of programmers working on complex problems to produce large, even huge software systems. A growing share of all software development work is being done by globally distributed teams. The management of software engineering teamwork, especially of a temporally and/or spacially distributed team, presents an enormous organizational challenge as well as an intricate technical problem, as such distributed teamwork requires tool support for coordination of cooperative activities, maintenance of project control, and sharing of information. We present an overview of the managerial (mainly organizational) basics and aspects of distributed software development, give an overview of the potential and the limits of some of the published research projects, extract the design principles for the construction of cooperative software development environments, and formulate a model for cooperative work processes in software projects.