Transitioning from a Co-Located to a Globally-Distributed Software Development Team : A Case Study at Analog Devices Inc

Global software development has become an extremely important issue for organizations at present in the climate of increasing tendency towards globalization and global outsourcing. A number of studies have been conducted which have identified a set of problematic areas which are common across projects, including language and cultural differences, trust factors, communication across temporal and spatial distances, lack of shared contextual awareness. This study of global software development at Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) is especially noteworthy for a number of reasons. Firstly, the project has recently moved from a co-located to a globally-distributed one, and thus the team had already had experience of being co-located, a factor that has not typically been the case in the studies published to date where teams are being established who have not previously been co-located. Also, as language and cultural factors were not an issue, the study was able to focus on the problems of communication over temporal and spatial distances. The study discusses how ADI attempted to address these problems and identifies the initiatives that worked well, and, more importantly, those that did not work as well. Among the findings was the fact that trust, which had been very solidly established among team members during co-location, was significantly eroded as the project team was reconstituted on a distributed basis.