RDEL #8: How does nationality and team virtualization impact software teams?
A look at how different nationalities and geographic dispersal impacts the social dynamics of a software engineering team.
Welcome back to RDEL! Each Monday, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership, and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer. (Note: since its a holiday weekend, we’re bringing our usual Monday edition to the top of your inbox on Tuesday. A nice way to start the short week 🎉).
Last week, our team was at the SF Engineering Leadership Conference (ELC) - we met quite a few subscribers IRL! Thanks for the support and enthusiasm in using research to answer challenging questions in engineering.
In this edition, we look at contemporary challenges in software engineering dynamics, and ask: how does team virtualization and nationality impact software teams?
The context:
While its common knowledge that an engineering team’s work is impacted by factors such as development environment and tooling, less work historically has been done on the impact of more “human” factors. Continuing research points to how social factors play a huge role in how well a team can deliver features and maintain the overall well-being of its members. Recent frameworks on developer productivity (ie the SPACE framework) have highlighted the importance of considering social factors in the developer team experience.
As engineering teams become more distributed and global, two factors significantly impact the social dynamics on an engineering team - how distributed they are, and how culturally different they are. This research looks at social dynamics in software engineering, and the impact that virtualization and nationality have on how teams work together.
The research:
Marco Hoffman and a team of researchers looked at human-centered causes, challenges, and mitigation strategies for engineering teams by surveying 192 software professionals and analyzing the results. Using a list of research papers and the National Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRe) dataset, they compiled a list of challenges developer face, and had developers use a Likert scale to rank the frequency and severity of those challenges.
Notable results include:
The most impactful team challenge reported was “insufficient analysis at the beginning of a task”, with an average score of 2.43, followed by “lack of leadership”.
Teams with 2-3 nationalities among teammates reported less frequent and critical challenges than teams with only 1 nationality. Researchers hypothesize that exposure to different nationalities might increase acceptance on different stances of procedures, leading to less disagreement. (Teams with 4+ nationalities reported higher numbers, but >90% of them were fully remote, which researchers believed contributed more to challenges than the nationalities)
Geographic dispersal and virtualization impacts a number of factors - for example, “lack of experience” was significantly more critical as a challenge to highly remote teams. The researchers believe this is due to the high-touch nature of less experienced engineers that makes more asynchronous work difficult.
The application:
This paper analyzed a number of social factors that software engineers face, and found evidence that both nationality and virtualization impact the software engineer experience. This can be applied in two ways -
This work adds to the large body of research that shows that more diversity creates better teams. This paper shows that having teammates from different nationalities increases the openness to explore unique ideas, leading to less frequency and severity of challenges on the team. It’s worth noting that language barriers can certainly make collaboration more challenging, but in general, creating a team of diverse backgrounds has a positive impact on how a team thinks and works together.
Virtualization can make the team experience harder. The researchers note that the sweeping impact virtualization has on other factors is probably due the fact that on remote teams, building social connections in general is harder. Building connective tissue virtually requires active effort, such as creating specific, overlapping time in the team’s schedule to get to know one another. Without these efforts, remote work naturally becomes more transactional and causes friction in how teammates collaborate.
We hope you enjoyed this week’s RDEL. Have a great rest of the week, and we’ll see you next Monday!
Lizzie
From the Quotient team