Customer Reviews

Global Software Teams Collaborating Across Borders and Time Zones

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If you have anything to do with global software development, read this book. It will bring you food for thought and fun and you will profit a lot. The book is never too deep to be readable nor too shallow to be usable, and obviously based on a wealth of real-world experience. I much liked the absence of over-hyped rhetoric.

This book is a gold mine! For those needing guidance in global software development practice, this book is a must read."Global Software Teams" supplies orginal prescriptions for dealing with cultural differences and collaborative teams not found anywhere. A work in progress, the advice on Global Information Systems Teams is well reasoned. Important telecommunications, development, methodologies, architecture and task alloiaction, and management techniques provide a useful survey of pertinent topics that will benefit any project, especially those engaged in global software development.Dr. Erran Carmel has written a book software managers can use.

Global Software Teams provides an excellent resource for projects teams embarking on a global implementation project. The book provides insight into how to engage team members of different cultures and backgrounds as well as tools to use to support their continued active participation on the project. I have employed the key messages from the book on my global projects with excellent results.

After using it as a course text for the Computer-Supported Co-operative working, Dr. Carmel's views about culture and technology are true. I am in a course, which has students from 10 different countries in 4 continents. We worked together using different collaborative tools. The gains and problems we experienced are in line with what Dr. Carmel described.

The book has examples with real world firms, from large to small, in industrialised countries to developing countries. It describes the problems they all face and how they solve them, and in some cases, turning them into advantages.

I recommend this book to both students and software developers who are involved in global teams. Since global development will continue to grow with advances in technology, we all need to fully comprehend all the issues involved for it to succeed.

I first read this book in 2000, after it was published in 1999. While many books have been published since on managing global or dispersed teams since this book was published, a few parts are still worth the read. Chapter 4 on coordination and communication with dispersed groups is still very relevant. Chapter 10 on building the team, from the very start is also pertinent. The case studies and profiles on actual companies and their use of offshore are also very relevant.