In December 2019, the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV emerged in the Chinese city Wuhan. This infectious disease has rapidly become a global pandemic and caused major disruptions in our economical society. The lock-down measures prevented our normal way of working. Due to these lock-downs, most of us are not co-located (anymore) and face-to-face collaboration unfortunately became impossible. We are forced to stay home while continuing with our work.
This situation may look very similar to Globally Distributed Software Engineering. GDSE is a discipline which focuses on distributed design, implementation and validation of software products and/or components. The ideas and research in GDSE are crucial now, since they can provide us with interesting insights on how distributed workspaces and projects can be organized. In this blogpost we will talk about some principles in GDSE; whether they can be applied to the era of COVID-19 lock-down and provide some guidance.
Distances
In GDSE, there are four environmental/external factors that are well studied: Geographical, Temporal, Language and Cultural. While all four factors are closely related, researchers study these factors independently, since they do not necessarily occur together. Therefore, we think this will be a very interesting point for SE teams to look at!
Geographical
GDSE usually takes place at least two geographic locations on at least different two continents. While coronavirus does not instantly send your colleagues/employees to other sides of the globe , the lockdown measures prohibits any physical (face-to-face) meetings. Therefore, a link between geographical distance and a COVID-19 lockdown is not far-fetched.
Interestingly, while geographic distance seems to be a very serious problem in GDSE, the effects of geographic distance on coordination and collaboration have not been conclusively determined [1]. Some researchers concluded that many of the observed distance are due to factors other than the simple geographical distance [2]. Others, such as Hinds [3], state that face-to-face communication is much more effective. Nevertheless, the importance of coordination and planning are well stated in all of these papers. Therefore, it is crucial to clarify distribution of goals, tasks, and responsibilities during these times. The dependency between teams should also be minimized if possible.
Cultural and Language
Language distance (native vs non-native) causes misunderstandings and lesser speaker acceptance due to unfamiliar accents in spoken language [1]. This effect can also be caused by the cultural distances. However, cultural distances can be more damaging, since it can lead to (different) ways of task execution, management styles or even increased conflict potential. While this can happen anywhere and is not necessarily unique to GDSE, the lack of physical meetings and communication (Allen Curve) amplifies the problem. To add insult to injury, some studies and surveys indicate that COVID-19 lockdowns lead to more tension and stress [reference link to news article].
There are several studies on how to narrow language and culture distances. Similar to geographical distance, most researchers again put emphasis on documentation and planning for the project. However, increasing informal communication seemed to be effective in narrowing the distance as well. For example, the management/team leaders can organize team members for cultural differences with online team-building projects or do daily coffee stands. These informal meet-ups should reduce the tension and stress between members! 1
Temporal
Temporal distances are also often called timezone distances. This is very unlikely to occur during COVID-19 lockdowns. Therefore, we shouldn’t worry too much about it.
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This is a reference. ↩