Intercultural Communication and Management Factors and Their Impact to the Process of Global Software Development for Virtual and Non-Virtual Teams

This position paper presents the factors involved in the successful software development and what is the impact of some methodologies like Agile in this process. Global software development projects may be a total success or an anticipated disaster for simple reasons that usually have nothing to do with the technology involved, with the time differences, or the product being built, but because of subtle intercultural factors. How do the language, the race, the gender, the religion, and the location affects the software development process from analysis and design to implementation, testing and maintenance? Do all these factors impact in the same way if we are working with a local team, and offshore development team or even a global virtual team? Is any specific software development methodology better suited for your particular case? How could you decide what’s the better approach? What will be the results and what our goals? The issues at stake are not superficial matters of the ways how people dress, or how clear do they speak in our local language, or what they like to eat, or their small daily behaviors, but are based in the fundamental differences in the systems of values that govern our lives. So institutions, corporations and global companies have to raise the level of awareness of their employees worldwide on the cultural differences, through various programs for intercultural or diversity training. But this poor model of cultural awareness is not enough to overcome some of the obstacles that intercultural differences bring to the table. So this paper will list and describe this important intercultural factors that directly impact in the software development process and how certain software development methodologies could be used in order to have a more systematic look or set of guidelines that would allow the team managers to evaluate and to decide how theuse of each one of these software development methodologies for local teams, non local teams and virtual teams will affect positively or negatively the outcomes of software development practices.