Discussion Week 11 Instructions: 1. The objective of this activity is to exchange arrive at a consensus about the methodology and data analysis of several academic articles. Some of the articles are provided for the professor while other articles will be provided by each student. 2. In this peer discussion, you will start threads. 3. On Wednesday or Thursday before noon, as if you were posting in a blog, you need to post on Blackboard one of the articles that attached 4. In the post you will attach the full version of the article and will describe: a) Research question or main research question. b) Main goal of the research c) The data collection, quantitative or qualitative. d) The n=X. The number of participants/events/situations analyzed. [footnoteRef:1] [1: ] e) Description of the participants/events/situations analyzed. f) The data analysis used. Summarize the general idea of that data analysis and some of the steps of the data analysis process. g) If so, what is the theoretical framework or model that the authors are using? A systematic review of knowledge sharing challenges and practices in global software development A g M a b a A R R A A K K K G S E 1 s b ( h 0 International Journal of Information Management 36 (2016) 995–1019 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Information Management jou rna l h om epage: www.elsev ier .com/ locate / i j in fomgt systematic review of knowledge sharing challenges and practices in lobal software development ansooreh Zahedia,∗, Mojtaba Shahinb, Muhammad Ali Babarb IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia r t i c l e i n f o rticle history: eceived 6 July 2015 eceived in revised form 24 March 2016 ccepted 13 June 2016 vailable online 7 July 2016 eywords: nowledge sharing nowledge management (KM) lobal software development (GSD) ystematic literature review (SLR) mpirical software engineering a b s t r a c t Context: Global Software Development (GSD) presents significant challenges to share and understand knowledge required for developing software. Organizations are expected to implement appropriate practices to address knowledge-sharing challenges in GSD. With the growing literature on GSD and its widespread adoption, it is important to build a body of knowledge to support future research and effective knowledge sharing practices. Objective: We aimed at systematically identifying and synthesizing knowledge sharing challenges and practices. We also intended to classify the recurrent challenges and most frequently reported practices in different contextual settings. Method: We used Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for reviewing 61 primary studies that were selected after searching the GSD literature published over the last 14 years (2000–September 2014). We applied thematic analysis method for analysing the data extracted from the reviewed primary studies. Results: Our findings revealed that knowledge sharing challenges and practices in GSD could be classi- fied in 6 main themes: management, team structure, work processes/practices, team cognition, social attributes and technology. In regard to contextual settings, we found empirical studies were mainly con- ducted in an offshore outsourcing collaboration model distributed between two sites. Most of the studied organizations were large enterprises. Many of the studies did not report any information for several con- textual attributes that made it difficult to analyse the reported challenges and practices with respect to their respective contexts. Conclusion: We can conclude: (a) there is a higher tendency among researchers to report practices than challenges of knowledge sharing in GSD. (b) Given our analysis, most of the reported knowledge sharing challenges and practices fall under the theme of “work practices”. (c) The technology related knowledge-sharing challenges are the least reported; we discussed the available technologies for sup- porting knowledge sharing needs in GSD. (d) The organizational contextual information is missing from a large number of studies; hence, it was not possible to investigate the potential relations between knowl- edge sharing challenges/practices and the contextual attributes of GSD teams. We assert the need of exploring knowledge sharing in the context of small/medium sized organizations to avoid the risk of findings being biased by specific empirical setting (e.g., large enterprises distributed between US and India). © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. . Introduction Global Software Development (GSD) has become an established oftware development paradigm that promises several advantages ut also suffers from well-known limitations (Herbsleb et al., 2001; ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses:
[email protected] (M. Zahedi),
[email protected] M. Shahin),
[email protected] (M. Ali Babar). ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.06.007 268-4012/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Damian & Moitra, 2006; Bhat, Mayank, & Murthy, 2006). The promised benefits include enabling organizations to implement strategies like Follow The Sun (FTS), benefiting from cost advan- tages in certain parts of the world, being in close proximity to customers, and creating opportunities for merger and acquisition, and accessing a large pool of talented software developers (Damian & Moitra, 2006; Herbsleb & Moitra, 2002; Grinter, Herbsleb, & Perry, 1999). GSD can also result in significantly increased complexity for project teams, who may have to face several kinds of new chal- lenges. Most of the GSD challenges stem from what is known as dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.06.007 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02684012 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ijinfomgt http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.06.007&domain=pdf mailto:
[email protected] mailto:
[email protected] mailto:
[email protected] dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.06.007 9 Inform G d a 2 s m d l w A i t m & t o c a m & t t a d ( m a e ( p c H m e p k t m i c a t a e f R a q i b 2 r i t a a a c k b k a 96 M. Zahedi et al. / International Journal of SD distances, i.e., temporal, geographical, cultural, and linguistic istances. These distances lead to communication, coordination, nd collaboration challenges (Grinter et al., 1999; Ågerfalk et al., 005; Carmel & Agarwal, 2001) that can impact several areas of oftware development. One of the key areas of software develop- ent being impacted by GSD is knowledge sharing as software evelopment is a knowledge-intensive activity whose success is argely dependent upon effective knowledge sharing among soft- are development teams (Kotlarsky & Oshri, 2005; Khan, Niazi, & hmad, 2009). GSD team members may find it difficult (or even mpossible) to share both tacit and explicit knowledge within a eam that is geographically distributed. Knowledge sharing is an integral part of Knowledge Manage- ent (KM) (Choo & de Alvarenga Neto, 2010; Santos, Goldman, de Souza, 2014). It is defined as « provision of task informa- ion and know-how to a person, so that (s) he can collaborate with thers to solve problems, develop new ideas or implement poli- ies or procedures» (Santos et al., 2014; Cummings, 2004). Choo nd Alvarenga (Choo & de Alvarenga Neto, 2010) identified four ajor categories of conditions to enable knowledge sharing (Choo de Alvarenga Neto, 2010): social/behavioral characteristics of eams (e.g., mutual trust, attentive enquiry, open dialogues), cogni- ive/epistemic attributes (e.g., common knowledge, shared values nd goals), organizational structure/strategies (e.g. empowered ivisions, leadership style) and provision of information systems e.g., internet, intranet, yellow pages). Ebert and De Man (Ebert & Man, 2008) discuss that effectively anaging software engineering knowledge (i.e., project, product, nd process) is of growing importance given the ever-changing nvironments of software development, e.g., globalization. They Ebert & Man, 2008) argued that in GSD settings, vendors usually ossess technical expertise and knowledge about a project, while lients hold requirements and application domain knowledge. owever, vendors without proper understanding of require- ents and application domain knowledge cannot effectively and fficiently apply their technical skills; and clients could not appro- riately provide business requirements without understanding nowledge needs of vendors. Bjornson and Dingsøyr (2008) report hat KM in software engineering is mainly based on utilizing infor- ation technologies. Boden and colleagues (Boden et al., 2012) criticize the mplementation of traditional KM approaches that tend to de- ontextualize by codifying knowledge but neglect behavioral spects and social learning that are specifically influential in GSD eams. GSD impedes the opportunities for face-to-face interaction nd informal chats between distributed team members (Grinter t al., 1999; Ågerfalk et al., 2005) which are considered quite help- ul for sharing knowledge (Grinter et al., 1999; Noll, Beecham, & ichardson, 2011). Time zone differences also decrease the mech- nisms of ad-hoc knowledge sharing by answering on-the-spot uestions. Cultural and linguistic distance plays a significant role n communication gaps between distant colleagues. From socio- ehavioural perspectives, several studies (e.g., Kotlarsky & Oshri, 005; Hinds & McGrath, 2006) indicate that developing trust and apport between dispersed members facilitate knowledge shar- ng.