Abstract—Global software development is becoming increasingly popular. Working in geographically distributed teams affords advantages to both employer and employee alike. Despite this, distributed working remains a point of contention for many organisations, with some claiming it unsuitable for complex collaborative work. Many argue that the complex act of team sensemaking (the process by which a team develops an understanding of a situation or problem) can only effectively be performed in co-located environments. To investigate this assumption, we examine the communications of a geographically
distributed game development team. This global team communicates entirely via forums, yet still manages complex
sensemaking tasks asynchronously. We use thematic analysis to investigate how themes develop during online conversations, and
use speech act sequences to explore how understanding is developed during these asynchronous conversations. Our findings demonstrate how collective sensemaking occurs within a real-world, geographically distributed team.
Funding
This work is funded by the Digital Economy programme (RCUK Grant EP/G037582/1), which supports the HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training http://highwire.lancaster.ac.uk
History
School
Business and Economics
Department
Business
Published in
IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2015
Citation
SHREEVE, B. ...et al., 2015. Geographically distributed sensemaking: developing understanding in forum-based software development teams. IN: IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2015, Florence, Italy, 18th May, pp. 36-42.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/