Supporting Synchronous Communication in Distributed Software Teams

Among the software development activities requirements engineering is one of the most communication-intensive and then its effectiveness is greatly constrained by the geographical distance between stakeholders. For this reason the need to identify the appropriate task/technology fits to support teams of geographically dispersed stakeholders plays a key role for coping with the lack of physical proximity when developing requirements. Building on an extensive review of the very many existing theoris on computer-mediated communication. This dissertation reports on an empirical study that assessed the use of synchronous text-based communication in distributed requirements workshops as compared to face-to-face (F2F) and the effects of computer-mediated communication (CMC) with respects to the different tasks of distributed requirements elicitation and negotiation. Results show that in terms of satisfaction with performance CMC elicitation is a better task/technology fit than CMC negotiation. Furthermore the general preference for F2F over CMC is due to the strong preference for the F2F negotiation fit over the CMC counterpart.