Enabling software shift work with groupware: a case study

Describes a software development trial to evaluate the use of a groupware support environment for widely geographically separated software development teams. A four-person dislocated team, working in (simulated) disjoint time zones, was assigned a development task to carry out over a two-week period. Due to the time and location displacement, the developers were denied almost all opportunities for synchronous communications and had to rely on support from a prototype software engineering support system developed in Lotus Notes for interactions and coordination. In addition, the tasks in the trial were allocated such that productivity gains could be experienced through positive exploitation of time-zone differences, effectively giving around-the-clock working. This paper describes the design and organisation of the trial, reports on the progress of the trial, and presents both quantitative and qualitative results regarding the use of the Notes prototype.