Introduction
Since the onset of the fiber optic technology, communication barriers have been broken and the virtualization of teams has been possible. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the significance of virtual teams and their management in software development. The paper defines virtual teams and discusses their importance, their types, and the tools used by them for collaboration. It also analyzes the challenges faced by these teams in terms of management, collaboration, and coordination. The various virtual platforms used by these teams, such as cloud computing, are discussed. A secondary literature analysis is conducted to understand the role virtualization in the software development process.
Discussion
Virtual teams
Virtual teams are clusters people separated by geographical barriers; as they are dispersed spatially as well as temporally, it is essential to bring them together using IT to realize organizational undertakings (Ebrahim, Ahmed, and Taha, 2009, p. 8). Today, we realize that virtualization can be incredibly advantageous for organizational teams. They can become self-reliant in acquiring resources and pool their infrastructure to competently manage workloads (Chen et al., 2008, p. 567). Nevertheless, it must be remembered that in order to ensure virtualization has been truly effective, it is important that the work environment is suited to the core infrastructure (Chen et al., 2008, p. 567).
Types of virtual teams
All virtual teams, irrespective of their configurations, must collaborate and communicate using technology to deliver a service or a product. They can be fundamentally divided to the following two types: temporary and permanent. Virtual teams are frequently used means of organizations in various industries and sectors, and such virtual teams are distributed over national and functional boundaries; they are temporary when they are involved in cross-border interactions for a certain period of time, such as developing software and permanent when continuously carrying out cross-border interaction, such as mergers and acquisitions (Cragan, Wright, and Kasch, 2009, p. 25). While originally, teams were viewed as virtual or face-to-face, such definitions were limiting as they did not describe the “fluid and interactive nature of the contemporary organizations” (Cragan, Wright, and Kasch, 2009, p. 25). The following diagram illuminates the nature of today’s virtual organizations.
Source: Cragan, J. F., Wright, D. W., and Kasch, C. R. (2009). Communication in small groups: theory, process, skills. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, p. 25.
Tools for collaboration
Examples of communication tools used commonly today are emails and instant messages. The means of interactions among virtual team members can be conversational, transactional, or collaborative (Freire and Periera, 2008, p. 166). Conversational interactions are fundamentally meant for relationship building. They can be carried out by using technologies such as emails, group calendars and schedules, personal computing devices, websites, etc. Transactional interactions involve interaction exchange with the aim to alter a relationship, such as, development of an idea or a design (Freire and Periera, 2008, p. 167). Such examples of interactive tools are threaded histories, interactive bulletin boards, etc. The real-time collaborative tools are audioconferencing, desktop and real-time data conferencing, electronic meeting systems, electronic displays, instant messaging, videoconferencing, etc (Freire and Periera, 2008, pp. 165–167).
Importance of virtual teams
The significance of virtualization for organizational teams is apparent in the many benefits gained. For example, it enables an organization to locate high performing employees in every corner of the world. It provides workers with flexibility to carry out their duties and thus, gives the organization a competitive edge by making it a responsive and flexible place to work. It also increases the level of technological erudition within an organization. Furthermore, virtualization aids in the formation of horizontal structures within organizations, which include human resources that are separated structurally as well as geographically. Nowadays, in every business, it is essential to continuously set out reliable applications in a steady manner to maintain a degree of competitiveness, and this requires skilful infrastructure management, which can be provided by virtualization platforms (Microsoft private cloud benefits, 2012). Moreover, the convergence of various manual processes makes assets available for several applications, which ensures that a company has a solid and market-oriented infrastructure (HP virtualization with Citrix, 2012).
Challenges to virtual teams
The challenges to virtual teams can be in the form of collaborative or coordination problems. A large body of communication can increase pressures as well as lead to ineffective communication; it is common to hear people complain about the number of emails they are compelled to answer every day. The objective of team collaboration and coordination is to increase attentiveness toward the situations where assumptive behavior often arises (Mistrík, 2010, p. 47). Furthermore, the virtual teams should have coordinated intentions and should be able to share their knowledge, innovative ideas, intelligence, and viewpoints (Mistrík, 2010, p. 47) (Mistrík, 2010, p. 49). Only the cumulative efforts of a virtual team can guarantee its success. Research to resolve issues emerging due to the lack of any or all of the above factors in an organization are ongoing. For instance, Boughzala, Assar, and Romano (2010) have identified superlative collaboration tools, which can, by themselves or in combination with other tools, increase the effectiveness of collaboration depending on the nature of the job and its related needs. This enhances the virtual team member’s awareness of the significance of process virtualization (Assar and Boughzala, 2008, p. 90).
Collaboration—which as the name suggests is the association between individuals or groups with common interests— within teams is a major challenge in today’s workplace, and the virtualization of collaboration processes is thus important, especially with the widespread initiation of virtual teams and the rapid evolution of collaboration technologies (Overby, 2008, p. 279). Generally, the functioning of virtual teams is contained by company structures or by collaborations between them, but newer concepts of virtual team structures suggest functioning of teams outside the formal structure of companies by initiating parallel virtual teams that function at a global level and are motivated by a community of practice (COP) (Cordery, et al., 2009, p. 204). COP is a “group of people who share interest, concerns, or problems in a topic area, and voluntarily choose to interact with each other to further their knowledge and expertise” (Cordery et al., 2009, p. 204). The creation and accumulation of knowledge within organizations is by individuals and not organizations, as it every individual’s unique body of knowledge that gets incorporated into an organization (Kock, 2008, p. 15). The method of this incorporation is by coordination, which can take place by the following four mechanisms: (1) decision making and group problem solving, (2) rules and directives, (3) routines, and (4) sequencing (Kock, 2008, p. 15). However, the first coordination method, while being more expensive than the rest, is a communication-intensive type of integration (Kock, 2008, p. 15). While classifying and managing dependencies amid necessities and is a key problem in coordination theory, the collective mind perspective balances these implications by stating that individuals realize how their commit to their work, and this positively influences the whole group (Kock, 2008, p. 15). Siebdrat, Hoegl, and Holger (2009, p. 63) have shown that a lack of constructive contribution of group support systems to knowledge adaptation sharing can hinder the development of virtual teams.
Communication problems
Yu-Ting and Nguyen (2008) conducted a study that showed global virtual teams—with physically and temporally scattered members—dealt with critical collaboration challenges related to cultural diversity due to their dependence on computerized communications. They concluded that if a team’s identity faultlines are strong, the members’ cultural individualism, collectivism, and language identities considerably influence their participation, and communication can positively affect the interactions. Faultlines are imaginary dividing lines that have the ability to divide a group into subgroups with single or numerous differences (Sherry and Patel, 2011, p. 2). Language barriers are an ever present problem in the virtualized world, and technology for improving these barriers is being rigorously researched (Luftman and Zadeh, 2001, p.194). In the arena of software engineering, Milewski et al. show that such distances can directly affect the software engineering process (2008). They have pointed out the benefits of using a “bridge” location for assisting coordination and collaboration in different locations to managers with diverse participants in dissimilar locations and circumstances. Nevertheless, because understanding group behavior is difficult, forming an effectual bridge is complex, and a manager needs to weigh the expenses and advantages of bridging with cultural, individual, and temporal dynamics in the organization. Espinosa, Cummings, and Pickering (2011) state that technical teams are often separated by spatially as well as time, but most studies consider either one of these factors. Thus, as space and time pose varying coordination challenges when they are together, their impact on geographical configuration and thus, on the team’s performance should be studied. Their results indicated that, time separation, especially in terms of maximum time zone variation among by members, can have an indirect—coordination problems—and highly negative impact on performance.
Communication in virtual teams
It can be concluded from the above paragraphs that communication, or rather the lack of it, is the underlying problems of coordination and collaboration. The famous quote, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place” succinctly describes the issues with communication between global virtual teams (George Bernard Shaw).
Managing virtual teams
Serrat (2009, p.1) calls a team “a cooperative unit of interacting individuals who are committed to a common purpose on tasks; endowed with complementary skills, for instance, in technical competence, problem-solving ability, and emotional intelligence; and who share interdependent performance goals (with indicators and deadlines) as well as an approach to work for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” However, such an idealistic definition can only be given theoretically. While virtualization had many benefits, it also had some negative effects, such as, context loss due to geographical distances, which in turn engenders feelings of isolation and challenges the degree of trust among individuals and teams (Serrat, 2009, p. 2). Survey studies on the reasons for the failure of global IT development projects relate that global managers has recognized cultural differences, time differences, and geographic and temporal distances as the most noteworthy barriers to the success of a project (Serrat, 2009, p. 2). However, it was also shown that coordination can solve the time distance problem, as in those IT companies, where tasks were well defined, the transfer of the task and its onus was successfully done at the end of the day (Serrat, 2009, p. 2). Managers also noted that they have often intervened during the norming stage of project to negate any possible conflicts (Siebdrat, Hoegl, and Holger, 2009, p. 64). They often go out of their way to ensure that team members bring their conflicts out in the open as well as proclaim that they remain accountable, that is, complete their tasks by the given deadlines (Rice, et al., 2007, p. 578). They thus established that there existed certain precursors that initiated feelings of trust within virtual teams, such as, opportune communications, comprehensive feedback, enterprising abilities, timely results, teamwork, care for each other, maintaining pledges, setting objectives, uprightness, and team support. Understanding virtual teams shows one their need for efficient leadership, and this leadership for virtual teams should depend on their type (Suttling and Wood, 2007, p. 62).
Basis of communication in virtual teams
This topic refers to the information technology platforms, infrastructure, and software that enable the communication between virtual teams. The modern-day organizations are rapidly becoming multifarious and vibrant, as they are going global, and the disseminated virtual teams are regarded as the most efficient means of systematizing units of work (Vaccaro, Veloso, and Brusoni, 2008, p. 14). The first experience with virtualization came to IT practitioners with the advent of hardware virtualization systems like VMware and Citrix (Hattangadi and Gupta, 2011, p. 2). Here, all the used hardware resources were simply pooled together to form a platform available to developers and testers, and thus, the expenses of IT infrastructure management were minimized. Today, this kind of virtualization is used as a communication platform for building applications, and as discussed before in this paper, the speedy and quality delivery of application decides the market place of an organization.
Cloud computing is swiftly moving up as a communication platform for virtualized teams in the IT industry, and is expected that eventually, it will become the most commonly used method of default method of delivering IT services (Kepes, 2011, p. 1). He summarizes the definition of cloud computing as follows it “is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (Kepes, 2011, p. 2). There are three categories or stacks within cloud computing, software (SaaS), platform (PaaS), and infrastructure (IaaS) as services. In Saas, the applications are meant for end users and are provided online. Paas is tools and services meant to undertake coding and quick and efficient deployment of applications, and Iaas refers to all the hardware and software, such as servers, operating systems, etc., that provide the entire support. Nowadays, agile software development, which is a group of software development methodologies anchored in iterative and incremental progress, is preferred (Kepes, 2011, p. 9). This is because the software is sensitive to individuals and interaction, and not just processes (Ambler, 2011). It can provide comprehensive documentations and responds to plan change and customer collaborations with sensitivity (Ambler, 2011). All these facts enhance the project success rate, and the agile teams not only deliver quality work but also deliver it with speed and with greater returns.
The following case study in Kepes (2011, p. 8) provides an example of Saas. Groupon, which was initiated in November 2008, provides deals on the best options for eating and sightseeing, and the most interesting activities to indulge in, etc. Its services are available for people across 40 countries and in more than 50 countries. The organizations hires scores of employees distributed Chicago and Palo Alto, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and many of its employees are local people hired as account executives. Groupon intends to provide products of the most superior quality as well the best services and customer support. Within a few months of their launch, the customer bases sky rocketed, and it was no longer a one man job, but a ticketing situation. The director of Customer service at Groupon, Joe Harrow believed in the growth and decided to seek enterprise-level support solutions, however, unsuccessfully. All the available enterprise-level solutions were complex and required great efforts to be set, and this would have resulted in increased efficiency, but affected the customers’ experience. Finally, Harrow found Zendesk, which was an intuitive program that was robust, and being a web-based solution, it could support the organization’s increasing volume. Groupon now has 150 customer support agents handling almost 15,000 tickets per day. This is an ideal example of the scalability brought in by SaaS. Similarly, CAMEL, a tool for collaborative distributed software design following virtual software design meetings showed that healthy communication is a must in software design activities, so that developers can freely exchange information (Cataldo, et al., 2009, p. 84). The tool is an efficient information sharing, conflict resolving, and consensus-bringing platform among geographically distributed designers. It makes organized drawing space for graphical representations. It can also extend a shared perceptive and focus during dialogue exchange and capture and store design-relevant information.
It is known that an information system’s requirements decide how it will operate, and any errors in the requirements can become a matter of concern as it can cause the system’s failure (Farinha and Miguel, 2011, p. 504). Have proposed web-based focus group methods to triumph over numerous predicaments within the requirements elicitation process. Collaboration is identified as the key to this, and several group work methods, such as, workshops comprising joint application development (JAD) are suggested (Farinha and Miguel, 2011, p. 504). Brainstorming holds the teams together for informal dialogue, to produce ideas speedily, but without a specific focus (Farinha and Miguel, 2011, p. 504). However, it cannot help in exploring the requirement. JAD and associated workshops centre on business needs, where the objectives of the business have already been identified (Farinha and Miguel, 2011, p. 504). An example of JAD is a web-based application, FileSender, which verifies and then enables its users to send randomly large files among themselves in a protected manner (Szegedi, 2011, p. 13). Users are verified by LDAP, RADIUS, and SAML2. Even those who do not have an account can receive a file by using a voucher provided by a verified user. FileSender is an open-sourced software meant to assist the requirements of the academic and research commune (Szegedi, 2011, p. 13).
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