Knowledge Scouts: Reducing Communication Barriers in a Distributed Software Development Project

As a result of globalization, mergers, acquisitions, and scarce skills, software development is increasingly more distributed. Distribution, however, introduces major communication barriers, including time zone differences, cultural differences, and most project participants have not met face to face. In this paper, we focus on “knowledge scouts,” developers that travel briefly to other sites and report back to their home base what they discovered and learned. With a case study we show how knowledge scouts overcome many communication issues. We propose that the research focus should be on the simpler problem of supporting the small mobile group of developers as a means of addressing the inherent communication obstacles in distributed software projects.