Cultural Influences on Collaborative Work in Software Engineering Teams

Abstract

International business activities increasingly lead to the formation of multicultural teams that work together as project teams, for a certain time both at a site as well as in virtual teams. Despite the modern conception of many companies that multicultural composite teams are more productive due to various perspectives and work styles, the ignorance and disrespect of these differences in work styles and perspectives can lead to misunderstanding and loss of productivity. In this paper, we report our findings from a systematic literature review that analyzes previous research on cross-cultural software engineering, to identify potential impacts of national cultural factors on collaborative approaches and behavior in software engineering teams. We discuss the current emerging state of knowledge and point out directions for advancing the understanding of cultural influences in this domain to lay the foundation for better collaboration design for cross-cultural software engineering teams.