Measuring Software Engineer Motivation in Globally Distributed Projects

Software development today has become truly global as many individuals and teams from several geographically distant places collaborate to create software. Many organizations employ such model of work organization striving for the most effective software development in terms of speed, price and quality [1]. Global software development (GSD) approach claims to enable benefits of access to larger skilled resource pools, reduced development costs, proximity to markets and other ones [1]. However, we still hear frequent complaints about poor efficiency [2], which most often is explained by different communication, coordination and control problems caused by distance, temporal separation and socio-cultural problems inherent in GSD [3]. While it is very important to solve these problems, we argue that possibly even more attention should be paid to software engineer work motivation as it is reported to be the key determinant for retention and have large impact on productivity and software quality [4]. Motivation is commonly referred to as soft factor, which is difficult to address and even more difficult to measure [4]. Nonetheless, the importance of this factor is crucial. If motivation has the large impact on productivity and about 70% of all costs in software development are related to human resources [5], then the impact of even minimal improvements is evident. Empirical evidence suggests that improved project success directly relates to good project management, which is underpinned by human factors [6], including work motivation. The nature of offshore development and GSD projects puts new demands on managers, as such projects are significantly more complicated than even the most complex project managed entirely in-house [7]. Besides, work motivation might have cultural flavours, and it might be negatively affected by geographic and temporal distance. Contemporary managers working in globally distributed projects shall be equipped with sufficient knowledge about motivation in different GSD settings. To the best of our knowledge no empirical research focusing on addressing motivation in global software development projects exists. In order to be able to perform an extensive empirical study on motivation of software engineers working in globally distributed projects, first, we developed a survey on software engineer motivation, which was based on previously widely used and well-tested surveys. 2. Research objective