Cultural and Socio-Technical Aspects in Software Development
Pages 482 - 487
Abstract
Software development is essentially a collaborative, socio-technical endeavor where the interplay between stakeholders and technical elements is integral. This synergy becomes particularly crucial in the context of geographically dispersed teams, a practice that is becoming more prevalent. Despite the ubiquity of this nature, the current body of research in Global Software Development (GSD) encounters limitations, rendering the attained results less accessible for practical implementation by industry professionals. Moreover, the role of social debt, the additional cost derived by adopting socio-technical anti-patterns, in GSD still needs to be deepened. This Ph.D. research project aims to surmount these challenges by constructing a robust theoretical foundation for effectively managing socio-technical aspects—particularly in the form of factors related to social debt—in software development, with a keen focus on their correlation with cultural differences within software teams. The framework systematically captures and examines cultural differences, investigating their ramifications on various facets of software development while exploring practical strategies employed by practitioners to navigate these influences. Furthermore, the project aspires to make substantial contributions to the professional software development realm by translating research findings into tangible tools for practitioners. This framework is designed not only for immediate application but also to facilitate project success through heightened cultural awareness and adaptability. Ultimately, it strives to enhance the well-being of developers working in inclusive and culturally diverse environments.
References
[1]
Sameer Abufardeh and Kenneth Magel. 2010. The impact of global software cultural and linguistic aspects on Global Software Development process (GSD): Issues and challenges. In 4th International conference on new trends in information science and service science. IEEE, 133–138.
[2]
Nuri Almarimi, Ali Ouni, Moataz Chouchen, and Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer. 2021. csDetector: an open source tool for community smells detection. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. 1560–1564.
[3]
Nuri Almarimi, Ali Ouni, Moataz Chouchen, Islem Saidani, and Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer. 2020. On the detection of community smells using genetic programming-based ensemble classifier chain. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Global Software Engineering. 43–54.
[4]
Nuri Almarimi, Ali Ouni, and Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer. 2020. Learning to detect community smells in open source software projects. Knowledge-Based Systems 204 (2020), 106201.
[5]
Greg Borchers. 2003. The software engineering impacts of cultural factors on multi-cultural software development teams. In 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2003. Proceedings. IEEE, 540–545.
[6]
Frederick P Brooks Jr. 1995. The mythical man-month: essays on software engineering. Pearson Education.
[7]
Eduardo Caballero-Espinosa, Jeffrey C Carver, and Kimberly Stowers. 2023. Community smells—The sources of social debt: A systematic literature review. Information and Software Technology 153 (2023), 107078.
[8]
Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba, Damian Andrew Tamburri, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2021. Understanding community smells variability: A statistical approach. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS). IEEE, 77–86.
[9]
Sébastien Cherry and Pierre N Robillard. 2004. Communication problems in global software development: Spotlight on a new field of investigation. In International Workshop on Global Software Development, International Conference on Software Engineering, Edinburgh, Scotland. IET, 48–52.
[10]
John W Creswell and J David Creswell. 2017. Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage publications.
[11]
Sadhana Deshpande, Ita Richardson, Valentine Casey, and Sarah Beecham. 2010. Culture in Global Software Development - A Weakness or Strength?. In 2010 5th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering. 67–76. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2010.16
[12]
Vahid Garousi, Michael Felderer, and Mika V Mäntylä. 2019. Guidelines for including grey literature and conducting multivocal literature reviews in software engineering. Information and software technology 106 (2019), 101–121.
[13]
Edward Twitchell Hall. 1989. Beyond culture. Anchor.
[14]
Charles Hampden-Turner, Fons Trompenaars, and Charles Hampden-Turner. 2020. Riding the waves of culture: Understanding diversity in global business. Hachette UK.
[15]
James D Herbsleb and Deependra Moitra. 2001. Global software development. IEEE software 18, 2 (2001), 16–20.
[16]
Rashina Hoda. 2021. Socio-technical grounded theory for software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 48, 10 (2021), 3808–3832.
[17]
Geert Hofstede. 1984. Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Vol. 5. sage.
[18]
Geert Hofstede. 2011. Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context. Online readings in psychology and culture 2, 1 (2011), 2307–0919.
[19]
Robert House, Mansour Javidan, Paul Hanges, and Peter Dorfman. 2002. Understanding cultures and implicit leadership theories across the globe: an introduction to project GLOBE. Journal of world business 37, 1 (2002), 3–10.
[20]
Project Management Institute. 2021. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (7 ed.). 250 pages.
[21]
Imran Javed, Uzair Iqbal Janjua, Shafi’i Muhammad Abdulhamid, Tahir Mustafa Madni, and Adnan Akhunzada. 2023. The Impact of Mitigation Strategies for Socio-Cultural Distance Issues in GSD: An Empirical Study. IEEE Access 11 (2023), 99499–99518. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3300836
[22]
Mansour Javidan and Robert J House. 2001. Cultural acumen for the global manager: Lessons from project GLOBE.Organizational dynamics (2001).
[23]
Stefano Lambiase, Gemma Catolino, Bice Della Piana, Filomena Ferrucci, and Fabio Palomba. 2024. Dealing With Cultural Dispersion: a Novel Theoretical Framework for Software Engineering Research and Practice. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society.
[24]
Stefano Lambiase, Gemma Catolino, Fabiano Pecorelli, Damian A. Tamburri, Fabio Palomba, Willem-Jan Van Den Heuvel, and Filomena Ferrucci. 2022. “There and Back Again?” On the Influence of Software Community Dispersion Over Productivity. In 2022 48th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA). 177–184. https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA56994.2022.00035
[25]
Stefano Lambiase, Gemma Catolino, Fabiano Pecorelli, Damian A Tamburri, Fabio Palomba, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, and Filomena Ferrucci. 2024. An Empirical Investigation Into the Influence of Software Communities’ Cultural and Geographical Dispersion on Productivity. Journal of Systems and Software 208 (2024), 111878.
[26]
Stefano Lambiase, Gemma Catolino, Damian A Tamburri, Alexander Serebrenik, Fabio Palomba, and Filomena Ferrucci. 2022. Good fences make good neighbours? on the impact of cultural and geographical dispersion on community smells. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society. 67–78.
[27]
Marcelo Marinho, Alexandre Luna, and Sarah Beecham. 2018. Global software development: practices for cultural differences. In International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. Springer, 299–317.
[28]
Antonio Martini and Jan Bosch. 2017. Revealing social debt with the CAFFEA framework: An antidote to architectural debt. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW). IEEE, 179–181.
[29]
Fabio Palomba, Damian Andrew Tamburri, Francesca Arcelli Fontana, Rocco Oliveto, Andy Zaidman, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2021. Beyond Technical Aspects: How Do Community Smells Influence the Intensity of Code Smells?IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 47, 1 (2021), 108–129. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2883603
[30]
Fabio Palomba and Damian Andrew Tamburri. 2021. Predicting the emergence of community smells using socio-technical metrics: a machine-learning approach. Journal of Systems and Software 171 (2021), 110847.
[31]
Paul Ralph, Mike Chiasson, and Helen Kelley. 2016. Social Theory for Software Engineering Research. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (Limerick, Ireland) (EASE ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 44, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2915970.2915998
[32]
Ita Richardson, Valentine Casey, John Burton, and Fergal McCaffery. 2010. Global Software Engineering: A Software Process Approach. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 35–56. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10294-3_2
[33]
Christian Ringle, Dirceu Da Silva, and Diógenes Bido. 2015. Structural equation modeling with the SmartPLS. Bido, D., da Silva, D., & Ringle, C.(2014). Structural Equation Modeling with the Smartpls. Brazilian Journal Of Marketing 13, 2 (2015).
[34]
Anselm Strauss and Juliet M Corbin. 1997. Grounded theory in practice. Sage.
[35]
Damian Andrew Tamburri. 2019. Software Architecture Social Debt: Managing the Incommunicability Factor. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 6, 1 (2019), 20–37. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2018.2886433
[36]
Damian Andrew Tamburri, Rick Kazman, and Hamed Fahimi. 2016. The architect’s role in community shepherding. IEEE Software 33, 6 (2016), 70–79.
[37]
Damian Andrew Tamburri, Philippe Kruchten, Patricia Lago, and Hans van Vliet. 2013. What is social debt in software engineering?. In 2013 6th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE). IEEE, 93–96.
[38]
Damian Andrew Tamburri, Philippe Kruchten, Patricia Lago, and Hans van Vliet. 2015. Social Debt in Software Engineering: Insights from Industry. Journal of Internet Services and Applications (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-015-0024-6
[39]
Damian Andrew Tamburri, Fabio Palomba, and Rick Kazman. 2019. Exploring Community Smells in Open-Source: An Automated Approach. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 47, 3 (2019), 630–652. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2901490
[40]
Damian Andrew Tamburri, Fabio Palomba, Alexander Serebrenik, and Andy Zaidman. 2019. Discovering community patterns in open-source: a systematic approach and its evaluation. Empirical Software Engineering 24, 3 (2019), 1369–1417.
[41]
Gianmario Voria, Viviana Pentangelo, Antonio Della Porta, Stefano Lambiase, Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba, and Filomena Ferrucci. [n. d.]. Community Smell Detection and Refactoring in SLACK: The CADOCS Project. ([n. d.]).
[42]
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, and Anders Wesslén. 2012. Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.
[43]
Affan Yasin, Rubia Fatima, Javed Ali Khan, Lin Liu, Raian Ali, and Jianmin Wang. [n. d.]. Counteracting sociocultural barriers in global software engineering using group activities. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process n/a, n/a ([n. d.]), e2587. https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2587 arXiv:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/smr.2587
[44]
Elijah Zolduoarrati, Sherlock A Licorish, and Nigel Stanger. 2022. Impact of individualism and collectivism cultural profiles on the behaviour of software developers: A study of stack overflow. Journal of Systems and Software (2022), 111427.
Index Terms
- Cultural and Socio-Technical Aspects in Software Development
Recommendations
Investigating Cultural Dispersion: on the Role of Cultural Differences in Software Development Teams
ICSE-Companion '24: Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion ProceedingsSoftware development, inherently a social activity, involves individuals across diverse geographical and cultural settings. Despite this nature, the existing Global Software Engineering research body encounters limitations, making the achieved results ...
Towards an understanding of tailoring scrum in global software development: a multi-case study
ICSSP '11: Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Software and Systems ProcessThere is growing interest in applying Scrum practices in Global Software Development to leverage the advantages of both. However, the effective use of Scrum practices largely depends on close interactions between project stakeholders. The distribution ...
Systematic literature review on agile practices in global software development
Abstract ContextDeveloping software in distributed development environments exhibits coordination, control and communication challenges. Agile practices, which demand frequent communication and self-organization between remote sites, are increasingly ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
June 2024
728 pages
ISBN:9798400717017
DOI:10.1145/3661167
Copyright © 2024 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 18 June 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Extended-abstract
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
EASE 2024
EASE 2024: 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
June 18 - 21, 2024
Salerno, Italy
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 232 submissions, 31%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 20Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)20
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7
Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format