What Makes for Effective Collaboration in Global Software Development?
Posted on Sat, Apr 24, 2010
"I already have the tools," Amit Gupta told me when I called him in Bangalore to talk about collaboration and distributed software development.
The reason for my call was a recent Forrester study on the state of collaboration software adoption. In this report, the author argues that collaboration software vendors need to move beyond the "reduces travel costs" argument and begin to shape the way that business leaders think about the benefits of collaboration more broadly.
I contacted Amit, who is Program Manager for Ness's SMART Collaboration Platform, to get his take on just how one might go about quantifying the operational benefits of effective collaboration as recommended.
In the course of our conversation, though, I began to realize something that these software vendors might not want to hear: no matter how versatile the technology, it is by no means the key to collaborative success.
"There are numerous collaboration tools, of course, and we rely on them quite extensively," Amit told me. "We're using Confluence, which is like an enhanced Wiki for community collaboration, and we've integrated that with Jira, our issue tracking application, as well as GreenHopper, the requirements tracking tool we use as part of our Agile implementation.
"And all this on top of our development tools: PMD, JUnit, Clover, Bamboo, and so on."
"But you see," Amit said, "these tools are just tools. They enable collaboration, yes, but collaboration does not depend on them. It depends on at least two other things: solid engineering practices, on the one hand, and a commitment to continuous improvement on the other.
"This last part is very important. In addition to allowing you to automate and support your common practices, any collaborative platform you choose should provide the capability to monitor and report on progress towards project goals," Amit said.
"When it's all there in black and white, when you have visibility into what's working and what isn't, it allows you to make decisions about where performance can be improved and what should happen next."
This insight-driven feedback loop has far-reaching consequences, Amit also pointed out, because the insight that allows you to solve a problem or refine a process on a given engagement becomes part of a growing pool of knowledge drawn from, and eventually re-applied to, every engagement.
"In our Software Product Labs," Amit explained, "we always develop unique engineering practices with our clients based on their objectives and their specific needs. At the same time, we're continually gathering best practices in the areas of testing, sustenance, support, HR, etc. that can be and are emulated elsewhere."
I would say that this adds a third dimension to collaborative success: your choice of partner. If this partner can bring a wide range of collaborative experience to bear, your own collaboration efforts will be that much more fruitful.
Yet, even with all the pieces in place - solid engineering practices, insights for continual improvement, an experienced partner - you've still got the question: How can we measure the impact successful collaboration?
When I posed this to Amit he conceded, "It is not easy."
Nevertheless, he offered the following suggestion on how it might be done.
"What if you have product releases that are always getting rolled back due to quality issues?" he asks.
"If you focus on your engineering practices, utilize the best tools, and - and this is of the utmost importance - use the insights provided by the technology to continually improve and accelerate your processes, that should produce results you can document and measure."
"Think of it this way," he adds, "as quality improves, rollbacks should decrease, and you should get better product to market more quickly. You can measure defects. You can measure time to market. You can know whether you meet deadlines or not. But then again, measuring this sort of impact itself takes time. It's not something that can be measured from one day to the next."
This led me to wonder, "Are there more snapshot-like measurements of collaborative efforts that could be used to demonstrate value more quickly?"
Well, are there?
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/s2art/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
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