Does Distance Still Matter ? Research Section

Nowadays, distributed development is common in software development. Besides many advantages, research in the last decade has consistently found that distribution has a negative impact on collaboration in general, and communication delay and time to complete tasks in particular. Adapted processes, practices, and tools are demanded to overcome these challenges. We report on an empirical study of communication structures and delay in IBM’s distributed development project Jazz. The Jazz project explicitly focuses on distributed collaboration and has adapted processes and tools to overcome known challenges. We explore the effect of distance on communication and task completion time and use social network analysis to obtain insights about the collaboration in the Jazz project. We discuss our findings in the light of existing literature on distributed collaboration and delays. Copyright  2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.