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 o g d fo b h m ex co to re ev d G p co p ac o o n d tw cu re ch re sp as g an q b o en th p ch re th e 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 03 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE rganizations face challenges in enabling effective onoing communication between headquarters and remote evelopment sites. Although weekly meetings are needed r strategic planning and negotiations of tradeoffs etween competing demands, organizations often don’t ave the luxury of arranging face-to-face requirements eetings on an ongoing basis. As a result, distance may acerbate fundamental RE problems such as poor mmunication among stakeholders, as well as those due factors of political, organizational and social nature. While recent research investigated distributed quirements negotiations in a controlled setting [6], more idence about multi-site organizations and RE at a istance needs to be gathered in the software industry. iven the relative novelty of the phenomenon and the aucity of research done in this area, it is important to nduct field investigations to understand the impact of roblems of communication and coordination on RE tivities, to identify challenges faced by multi-site rganizations, and to formulate recommendations to vercome problems associated with distance. Practitioners eed to be aware of such findings in order to cope with istance, when co-located development is not an option. In this paper we report the findings of a case study of o multi-site development organizations where groups of stomers, product management and engineering specified quirements from remote locations. We describe the allenges faced by the stakeholders in activities such as quirements elicitation, analysis, negotiation and ecification. The specific focus of the paper is on an pect that is gaining increased interest in the literature on lobal collaboration, i.e. the interplay between conflict d culture in the distributed teams. The paper begins by a description of the research uestion and methodology in Section 2, followed by ackground information on the two multi-site rganizations in the case study. In Section 4, requirements gineering challenges due to distance are described in e form of a three-layer model. It identifies four known roblems of global software development, the specific allenges identified in this study, as well as the quirements engineering activities directly affected by ese challenges. A common theme in the evidence from