Paper short abstract:

Our empirical research on projects of distributed software development focusses on software development methodology and on how the software tools and organization techniques it provides structure and govern the communication, coordination and collaboration in distributed teams.

Paper long abstract:

We present results from case studies on projects of software development in which part of the work is nearshored to Eastern Europe. In all our cases, the coordination of the transnationally distributed team is governed by the software development methodology Scrum. Scrum provides organizational techniques as well as software technology for governing software development. Or research investigates the role of governance by technology and by organizational techniques in distributed teams. There are several methodologies for structuring, organizing, managing, and governing software development. Scrum is the methodology mostly used today in small and medium sized development teams. The Scrum methodology includes guidelines defining a set of roles with their respective rights and duties (such as "Product Owner or "Scrum Master"). It specifies how the work should be organized (in "Sprints") and coordinated (for example by "Daily Scrums"). And it describes certain Scrum Artifacts, that is, technological tools (such as the "Product Backlog"), which are representing the technological counterpart to the organizational structure of the Scrum process model. Though Scrum came into life as an organizational project management technique, meanwhile many of its components have been complemented by software tools, or even turned into software. For investigating how governance by technology works and how it interacts with organizational techniques and informal practices, distributed software development is a particularly suitable field of study. This is because the spatial distance requires technologically mediated communication and coordination and, consequently, invites attempts to automatize information flows and to regulate coordination technologically.