Global Software Engineering

Virtualization and Coordination

Gamel O. Wiredu

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429589768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Technology and organizations co-evolve, as is illustrated by the growth of information and communication technology (ICT) and global software engineering (GSE). Technology has enabled the development of innovations in GSE. The literature on GSE has emphasized the role of the organization at the expense of technology. This book explores the role of technology in the evolution of globally distributed software engineering.

To date, the role of the organization has been examined in coordinating GSE activities because of the prevalence of the logic of rationality (i.e., the efficiency ethos, mechanical methods, and mathematical analysis) and indeterminacy (i.e., the effectiveness ethos, natural methods, and functional analysis). This logic neglects the coordination role of ICT. However, GSE itself is an organizational mode that is technology-begotten, technology-dominated, and technology-driven, as is its coordination. GSE is a direct reflection of ICT innovation, change, and use, yet research into the role technology of GSE has been neglected.

Global Software Engineering: Virtualization and Coordination considers existing fragmented explanations and perspectives in GSE research, poses new questions about GSE, and proposes a framework based on the logic of virtuality (i.e., creativity ethos, electrical methods, and technological analysis) rather than of rationality and indeterminacy. Virtuality is the primary perspective in this book's comprehensive study of GSE. The book concludes with an integrated explanation of GSE coordination made possible through ICT connectivity and capitalization.

Chapter 1

Introduction

By virtue of innovation and the ubiquity of information and communication technology (ICT), global distribution of software development resources and activities has emerged as a global virtual work configuration – labeled as global software engineering (GSE). ICT is the main enabler of this configuration because of its power and promise to reduce spatial, temporal, and structural barriers. In organizations where this promise has been fulfilled fully or to a significant degree, they enjoy advantages such as cost reduction, access to global pools of expertise, formulation of global virtual teams, and closer-to-market and round-the-clock development. Eric Overby’s process virtualization theory¹ suggests that ICT is the predominant resource that enables organizations to virtualize teamwork configurations and processes across global spaces, time, and structures. The theory assumes that once technology can remove time and space barriers to enable process participation and when technology can authenticate the people participating in the process and track their activities, then, given the absence of the dependent variables, organizations will seek to achieve processes virtualization.

Virtualization in the global context (hereafter, virtuality or virtualization) therefore describes how ICT, in combination with and in transformation of space, place, and other organizational resources, enables spanning of discontinuities between geography, time, organization, culture, and work practices. Yet virtuality is at the same time confronted by the reality of geographic dispersion, electronic dependence, structural dynamism, and national diversity that may hinder team effectiveness in this configuration. Thus, in spite of the advantages provided by technology enablement in GSE, there are theoretical and practical problems of coordination in this work configuration.

Coordination is the management of dependencies, uncertainties, and conflicts between people and activities. Dependency is a goal-relevant relationship between two or more people or tasks in which a task cannot begin or be completed until another one has occurred, begun, or completed. Uncertainty refers to incomplete information about an organizational phenomenon that makes it difficult to predict its behavior accurately. Conflict exists when people involved in task performance hold discrepant views or have interpersonal incompatibilities.

Coordination is a fundamental problem for collocated organizations, but the problem is escalated in the globally distributed organizational context because of issues such as cultural and national diversity of developers, erratic information exchanges, mutual knowledge problems, politics, increased uncertainties, geographical distance, and technological limitations. The issues are more pronounced in GSE, and they undermine the management of dependencies, uncertainties, and conflicts to increase the difficulty of coordination. Given that the difficulty of coordination increases with project size and complexity,² the escalated problem of GSE coordination is very real in its theoretical and practical dimensions.

Yet the continuous organization of GSE around the world is testament to adequate coordination practice by global software teams in the face of virtualization. Both the escalated problem of coordination and how organizations achieve coordination are quite perplexing for improving coordination theory. The perplexity has generated high research interest among scholars, especially in information systems and organization studies research streams. The outcomes of this interest are four separate theoretical perspectives on (or approaches to) GSE coordination – technology, information, geography, and organization – developed to complement extant coordination theory and to inform and guide research and management.

Unfortunately, researchers’ particular or separate foci on these perspectives have resulted in fragmented and, hence, inadequate, explanations of coordination in existing publications. Fragmented explanations betray the low development of GSE coordination theory that has left us with low understanding of the relationships between these perspectives. Yet the practice of GSE around the world suggests clearly that technology, information, geography, and organization interrelate to provide organizations with cost, access, market, teamwork, and development advantages. This disparity between coordination practice and theory constitutes a significant theoretical gap that this book attempts to fill.

To explain how and why the relationships between these perspectives achieve coordination, this book appraises and integrates them with a virtual approach. The appraisal and integration are necessary for the improvement of GSE coordination theory to account for virtuality of software engineering teamwork. The logic of virtuality is given primacy ahead of the traditional predominant logics of rationality and indeterminacy because, first, it is assumed to be the primary logic of GSE. Second, it encapsulates technology, information, geography, and organization (the four perspectives) and their interrelations better than rationality and indeterminacy. Third, it assumes that ICT is essential and generative. These reasons imply that the best approach to manage a GSE organization is to conceptualize it as an ICT-based representation and simulation of its geography, people, and processes. In short, the appraisal and integration task of this book is approached with the premise that virtuality is the primary essential logic of this organizational configuration.

When we approach the study of the organization, technology, information, and geography of coordination with virtuality, these four perspectives become significant for the development of a technology-centered yet integrated explanation of GSE coordination. The view of ICT in the existing and traditional approaches as instrumental is a major weakness of existing coordination theory since it quite overlooks the essential role ICT plays as a core phenomenon that enables virtual teamwork. Such an assumption and its source (that virtuality is not the primary logic of GSE organization, but rationality and indeterminacy are) must be viewed indeed as very limited. This is because rationality and indeterminacy are epiphenomena that are incapable of reaching into the depths of how the combination of organization, technology, information, and geography are implicated in coordination. By assuming that virtuality is primary but only secondary to coordination, we recognize only its contextual side. Yet it is in its epistemological side – that is, when it is treated as the primary logic of organization – that we can develop a sound technological explanation of GSE coordination. Chapter 3 presents an elaborate explanation of how and why virtuality is the primary logic of GSE organization.

This book proposes a new explanation of GSE coordination practice, showing how and why the virtual logic premise and the four perspectives constitute an improved theory of technology coordination. The new explanation points to a more holistic understanding of how and why ICT is the essence of GSE coordination. The four-fold argument in support of the proposition is this: technology is the material basis of coordination; it is essential for exploitation of geography; information management is achieved by combining technology and human agencies; and technology is essential for the spatial and temporal resolution of the paradox of organization.

In Chapter 2, the motivation for writing this book is justified. It presents a review of the limitations with extant GSE coordination theory to point out the neglect of a virtualization approach to the theory. The review is enlarged to cover existing perspectives of technology, information, geography, and organization. Each of the perspectives is discussed to show that it is a particular aspect of virtuality, and yet limited on its own unless they are integrated. The chapter argues that the lack of a coordination theory that is integrated through a virtualization approach is due to the assumption that virtuality is incidental or contextual rather than essential to GSE. On the whole, the chapter prepares the motivational and theoretical grounds for the subsequent chapters of the book.

In order to demonstrate how and why virtuality is an essential logic of GSE organization, Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of the prevalent logics of organization – rationality and indeterminacy. The assumptions of rationality and indeterminacy are discussed to suggest that virtualization is currently deemed as a quality of these logics instead of being deemed as a logic in its own right. To justify the book’s estimation of virtuality as the primary organizational logic, it is discussed in terms of the peculiar task coordination challenges it addresses, as compared with the task coordination challenges addressed by rationality and indeterminacy.

Chapter 4 discusses theories of social presence, media richness, computer-supported cooperative work, and media synchronicity, leading to the argument that these theories are all represented in media ecology theory. Media ecology theory is therefore used as the overarching framework to explain the variability and materiality of ICT. The explanation suggests that ICT should not be understood as a static medium but as one that has been enriched continually – evidenced by the development of group support systems. Furthermore, in spite of tight coupling between the ICT medium, the message it conveys, the transmitter and the receiver, the analysis focuses on the materiality of the ICT medium. Applying this reasoning to the coordination function of teleconferences in GSE, the chapter shows that they enable software developers’ multitasking and ready access to information. These are distinctive functions which are discussed to show that technology is material in the virtuality perspective on coordination.

Chapter 5 explains coordination from an information management perspective. This explanation is based on an analysis of how information management is implicated in handling the emergent, increased, and varied uncertainties that attend GSE. The analysis evaluates mechanical and organic information processing capabilities of technology and human resources and activities to show how they combine to manage the four different sources of uncertainties in this work configuration. The chapter conceptualizes coordination in terms of interrelations between selection of software developers’ task-resolving resources; exploitation of their distance-bridging activities that are non-technological; and support for their technology-based interactions.

Existing GSE research publications make some references to place, space, and ICT, but how these factors shape coordination are quite unclear in the information systems development literature. Chapter 6 addresses this limitation through analysis of how coordination is underpinned by the phenomenological reality of place on the one hand, and the general reality of space and technology on the other. Coordination is characterized by workplace formation and identification with ad hoc verbal communications and by dataspace utilization and appropriation for cross-site collaborations.

The purpose of Chapter 7 is to conceptualize the paradox of coordination through a review and interpretation of existing literature. The discussions are premised on the assumption that GSE configurations are characterized by a paradox of organization – direct effects of global distribution and compensations for the effects. The paradox manifests in positive and negative relations between dependencies, uncertainties, and conflicts at the same time. The discussions show that coordination is achieved by managing direct and inverse relationships between multiple dimensions of dependencies, uncertainties, and conflicts.

Using the distinct logic of virtualization as well as the previous four chapters of the book as a premise, Chapter 8 undertakes a dialectical interpretation of the contradictory logics of rationality and indeterminacy to propose a synthesized theory of GSE coordination. Labeled as coordination by technology, this theory is explained as the combined use of digital technology supported by developers’ dexterity to manage dependencies. The mechanisms of coordination by technology are ICT connection and capitalization.

Chapter 9 uses the results of a case to illustrate the proposed theory of coordination by technology. The illustration shows how coordination by technology can be used to interpret process data from a longitudinal case study wherein coordination modes by a global virtual team were investigated. The data are not used to test the proposed theory, but to illustrate their usefulness in explaining how the practice of coordination reflects a dialectical process whereby technology constitutes a synthesis of coordination by plans and by mutual adjustments. Furthermore, the illustrative data points are not presented as a representative proportion of a certain population in order to serve as the bases for statistical generalizability of the proposed theory. Rather, the theory depends on empirical processes of necessary relations between GSE, ICT, and developers generated by real structures that serve as the bases for analytical generalization.

The book closes with reflections on the contributions proffered by the virtuality approach and technological explanations in Chapter 10. The theoretical contributions are discussed in relation to previous explanations of coordination to argue for the distinctiveness of this book. This chapter provides concluding arguments on how and why technology is not just an instrumental but an epistemological issue. In these arguments, the claims for novel contributions are discussed in terms of explanatory depth and breadth that the analyses in previous chapters demonstrate. Based on the theoretical contributions, the future research implications and directions, as well as the practical guidelines for managers of GSE organizations and projects, are discussed.

Chapter 2

Coordination Theory

The practice and theory of coordination in software engineering are significant issues for project managers and researchers.¹ Coordination was an underpinning philosophy of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, and the study of it has remained the preoccupation of many organizational researchers since then.² Generally, the coordination literature reveals some particularity or divergence in explanations of the concept. While a majority of researchers explain coordination as the management of dependencies, others explain it in terms of managing uncertainties,³ and others explain it in terms of interpersonal and inter-unit conflict management.⁴

The earliest conceptualizations of coordination are found in analyses of types of dependencies, differentiation and integration,⁵ and coordination modes.⁶ For instance, James D. Thompson, drawing upon James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, analyzed three types of dependencies – pooled, serial, and reciprocal. In pooled dependence, units in an organization appear to be independent of each other and may not interact with each other; yet, total breakdown occurs when one unit performs inadequately. Serial or sequential dependence reflects a situation in which one unit directly and visibly depends on the outcome of another unit’s actions to function, but this also represents linear causality.⁷ The cyclical nature of causation makes reciprocal or “mutual” dependence⁸ a more appropriate conceptualization. Mutual dependence is a normal feature of any organization, as espoused in Scott D. N. Cook and John Seely Brown’s knowledge-knowing interrelationships,⁹ and in Gregory Bateson’s ecological theory of mind systems.¹⁰

In large sections of the coordination literature, dependencies are implicitly and explicitly antecedents or consequences of uncertainties. For example, Richard L. Daft and Robert E. Lengel argue that “[i]nterdependence increases uncertainty because action by one department can unexpectedly force adaptation by other departments in the production chain.”¹¹ Others also suggest the significance of uncertainty in the problem of coordination.¹² According to Frances Milliken, uncertainty is “an individual’s perceived inability to predict something accurately.”¹³ This understanding resonates with Andrew Van De Ven and colleagues’ argument that a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Coordination Theory
• 3 Logic of Virtuality
• 4 Materiality of Technology
• 5 Management of Information
• 6 Exploitation of Geography
• 7 Paradox of Organization
• 8 Virtuality of Coordination
• 9 Illustration of Coordination
• 10 Reflections
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index