Workshop 4: "The Challenges of Collaborative Work in Global Software Development"

Organisers: Gabriela Avram (Interaction Design Center & Lero, University of Limerick, Ireland), Pamela Abbott (University College Dublin, Ireland), Pär J. Ågerfalk (Jönköping International Business School, Sweden), Liam Bannon (Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland), Vibeke Dalberg (Det Norske Veritas, Norway), Kate Ehrlich (IBM Research, Cambridge, US)

Workshop overview:
Global Software Development (GSD) is a growing focus of attention in universities and firms worldwide. The motives for distributing software development on a global scale include expected reductions in costs, exploiting a broader skills base, and being closer to emerging markets. In GSD, business units collaborate across time zones, organisational boundaries, work cultures and geographical distances, something that ultimately has led to an increasing diversification and growing complexity of collaborative working practices.
The real-world practice of developing software in globally distributed projects has been viewed from various perspectives, though technical and engineering in conjunction with managerial and organizational viewpoints have dominated the research agenda so far.  Successful participation in GSD, however, is ultimately a matter of the participants understanding and exploiting the particularities of their respective local contexts at specific points in time and exploring practical solutions through the resources available to local actors. During this workshop, we would like to focus on GSD as a collaborative human activity, where the participants are highly dependent on computer-based technologies to be able to cooperate across geographical boundaries and to accomplish their work.
The workshop will take place as a full day session with a maximum of 20 participants selected on the basis of the submitted papers.

Who should attend:
For this workshop, we invite contributions from different backgrounds (software engineering, CSCW, information systems, interaction design, sociology) to explore the challenges of collaborative work in Global Software Development.
For a list of suggested topics, please consult the workshop website.

The workshop will be a full-day event and will be open to a maximum of 20 participants.

More info regarding the actual workshop and the accepted papers at: http://www.idc.ul.ie/idcwiki/index.php/The_Challenges_of_Collaborative_Work_in_Global_Software_Development

Dissemination:
We will make the working papers available online. Additionally, depending on the quality of submissions, we might attempt to compile a journal special issue.

Submissions:
Submission deadline: June 27th, 2007
Email your submission (.doc or .pdf format) to Gabriela dot Avram at ul dot ie
Notification of acceptance: July 11th, 2007