Studying Work Practices in GSE

1. Studying Work Practices in GSE

2. Glosoft Research Group • Diverse Research Personalities • 3 senior-, 3 junior-researchers, corporate partners • Diverse Contexts • University class projects, fortune 50-500 corporations, collegial teams • Diverse Topics • Culture and temporal perception; management and delegation; information-seeking strategies; team structure; actionable success/failure factors

3. Glosoft Research Group • Diverse Methods • Ethnographic Analysis • Case Study • Modeling web-based questionnaire responses

4. Workplace Practices Studied in • Fortune 500 Software Testing organization • Small, informal teams • Software prototyping • Research demeanor environment process communication

5. Work Practices Observed:(Qualitative methods) • Demeanor of teams and members: • High intensity and focus on work

6. Work Practices Observed:(Survey methods) • Demeanor of teams and members: • Distance distorts perception of remote team members' competence • Perception of competence affects one's trust towards remote members Our interview not successful at revealing competence and trust issues

7. Work Practices Observed:(Qualitative methods) • Process: [Software Testing] • Testing run by spreadsheet • Hour by hour update of spreadsheet • There are bugs that never get fixed – code for this • Testing broken into little pieces • List number of hours it will take to do testing – code for this • Spreadsheet doesn’t show completion but status • Assessments are made on a pattern of testing that occurs • Very highly controlled

8. Work Practices Observed:(Survey methods) • Process: • Remote teams work hard for headquarters' recognition • Leaders delegate managerial functions to competent sub-teams • Leaders delegate more to members collocated with them • Team members are motivated by automation in handling issues in daily work Hypothesis-oriented surveys miss much of the context

9. Work Practices Observed:(Qualitative methods) • Meetings and Communications: • Meet with everyone every day • Only meet with managers • People in Ireland – partition up the tests and write the descriptions of what is to be done • This work then gets distributed to the remote teams • Key thing in testing is that the remote sites run into problems they cannot resolve – need to connect to development in the US

10. Work Practices Observed:(Survey methods) • Meetings and Communications: • Language is not considered a major barrier in working remote team members • Time zone differences is major challenge to communication While these issues were mentioned in interviews also, survey could compare quantitatively to other issues

11. Work Practices Observed:(Qualitative methods) • Physical Context and Office practices: • People don’t have their own desk • People move from table to table to work together • No personal space or very little • Not a comfortable place to work in • Nothing to read in waiting room • Space is very empty- no sense of warmth • Physical space is less a part of their work

12. Work Practices Observed:(Survey methods) • Physical Context and Office practices: • none Need to be physically present to gather this since workers seldom talk about it.