Information "bridging" in a global organization (original) (raw)

2007, Proceedings of the 2007 conference of the center for advanced studies on Collaborative research - CASCON '07

This paper describes an interview study investigating the collaborative information-seeking andsharing practices of a global software testing team. A site located in Europe was used as a temporal bridge to help in managing time zone differences between the US, China and India. All sites utilized this bridge for critical, synchronous information seeking. Interviews suggest that bridging can be a taxing job and that the success of the bridging arrangement depended upon an intricate balance of temporal, infrastructure and cultural factors. Information seeking and sharing are communication activities that are critical for successful software engineering, design, development and testing. Engineers spend from forty per cent to seventy-five per cent of their work time engaged in communication activities [12] [24] [29]. Some proportion of the information needed by software