Pitfalls in remote team coordination: Lessons learned from a case study

Abstract

As companies become more and more distributed, multi-site development is becoming a norm. However along with the new opportunities, geographic distribution is proven to increase the complexity of software engineering introducing challenges for remote team communication, coordination and control. In this article we present an illustrative singe-case study with an intra-organizational intra-national context focussing on the effect of geographic distribution on team coordination practices and how this influences remote team performance. Based on our findings we conclude that a) distribution significantly influences the nature of coordination; b) remote team coordination mechanisms can't be chosen disregarding the complexity of the given tasks and c) the distribution of work on complex software development tasks shall be avoided. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.