Communication problems in global software development: spotlight on a new field of investigation

While it is widely recognized that communication plays a critical role in software development, it has been observed that problems of coordination may be generated when teammates in the field are working at a distance from one another. This paper presents an ongoing empirical study on ad hoc collaborative activities which occur in an industrial software engineering environment. We believe that a better understanding of these types of activities and their content will pave the way to further solutions designed to enhance communication, and thus improve both collaboration and coordination in virtual software development settings. We include details of our motivations for the study, followed by some methodological considerations, and, finally, some preliminary results which demonstrate not only the significance of our data, but also the relevance of our approach.