Global Software Team and Inexperienced Software Team

Given that the number of qualified programmers cannot be increased drastically and rapidly, software managers in most parts of the world will likely have to live with a human resources shortage in this area for some time. One way of dealing with this shortage is to form global software teams in which members are recruited from all over the world and software is developed in a distributed manner. Forming such a global software teams can have many advantages. In addition to alleviating the problems caused by scarcity of human resources, programmers on a global team would be free to work without being confined by physical location. Although forming global software teams may increase the size of the pool of programmers that can be recruited, both team quality and software quality are issues of great concern. Some software companies would prefer to establish a global software team with software programmers in developing countries, such as China, Poland, and South Africa (Sanford, 2003). Given the tremendous salary gap between skilled and unskilled developers or between developed and developing countries, it is not difficult to see that maintaining a team with a proportion of less experienced members significantly reduces running expenses (Figure 1). On the other hand, however, it would present the problem of managing inexperienced programmers. This chatper shares our experience of managing inexperienced software teams in China. To simplify our discussion, we deal separately with the two topics of inexperienced software teams and global software teams. However, it should be noted that a global software team can be composed of both inexperienced and experienced software subteams. We categorize the problems in these two types of software teams which will help software managers learn more how to manage the two types of software teams.