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Shreeve Ralph Sawyer Stacey CHASE-Excalibur-Paper.pdf (258.7 kB)

Geographically distributed sensemaking: developing understanding in forum-based software development teams

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conference contribution
posted on 2016-06-16, 10:01 authored by Ben Shreeve, Paul Sawyer, Pete Ralph, Patrick StaceyPatrick Stacey
Abstract—Global software development is becoming increasingly popular. Working in geographically distributed teams affords advantages to both employer and employee alike. Despite this, distributed working remains a point of contention for many organisations, with some claiming it unsuitable for complex collaborative work. Many argue that the complex act of team sensemaking (the process by which a team develops an understanding of a situation or problem) can only effectively be performed in co-located environments. To investigate this assumption, we examine the communications of a geographically distributed game development team. This global team communicates entirely via forums, yet still manages complex sensemaking tasks asynchronously. We use thematic analysis to investigate how themes develop during online conversations, and use speech act sequences to explore how understanding is developed during these asynchronous conversations. Our findings demonstrate how collective sensemaking occurs within a real-world, geographically distributed team.

Funding

This work is funded by the Digital Economy programme (RCUK Grant EP/G037582/1), which supports the HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training http://highwire.lancaster.ac.uk

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2015

Citation

SHREEVE, B. ...et al., 2015. Geographically distributed sensemaking: developing understanding in forum-based software development teams. IN: IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2015, Florence, Italy, 18th May, pp. 36-42.

Publisher

© IEEE

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2015-05-16

Publication date

2015

Notes

© IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Language

  • en

Location

Florence, Italy