Important Dates
Here are the (tenative) dates:
- Submission Deadline (fix): 1 April 2014
- Author Notification (tent.): 3-5 June 2014
- Camera Ready (tent.): 29 July 2014
Background
Projects with team members located around the globe have become increasingly common in software, R&D, and business processes across all industry sectors. Improving the effectiveness and efficiency of virtual teams is therefore an increasingly business-critical issue. Issues associated with distributed development include:
- establishing, managing, and controlling virtual teams;
- supporting team members with tools for coordination, information sharing, and communication;
- organizing interdisciplinary projects;
- assigning tasks and achieving alignment; and
- motivating the team, addressing cultural differences, and other human factors.
While awareness of these issues can result in improved coordination, distributed work introduces huge coordination overheads. Research shows that, although computer-supported collaborative work has increased, many distributed teams aren't benefiting from tools and approaches that currently exist. In other words, a lack of empirical data exists to demonstrate the feasibility of existing approaches in practice.
Although much research has focused on globally distributed teams, little is known about systematic, efficient, and empirically proven methods to establish a performing virtual team with regard to its management and tool support, as well as impacts on a team's performance that can arise from human factors and cultural differences.
This special issue aims at collecting empirically validated solutions that help to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of virtual teams or that increase the quality of their outcomes. We invite contributions relating but not limited to
- solutions for establishing and managing virtual teams,
- measurement of virtual teams' efficiency,
- social and human aspects in the context of distributed projects,
- processes and methods for distributed projects,
- tools to support distributed projects and virtual teams with empirical demonstration or validation of their impacts,
- evaluation of the feasibility (for example, by experimentation) of teaming approaches in global software development,
- hands-on examples that demonstrate the applicability of different solutions in practice, and
- industry experience, case studies, and field studies.
Each article should clearly outline the problem to be addressed, the solution or the findings, (at least) a proof of concept, and the options for transferring the solution/findings into practice.
Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts must not exceed 4,700 words including figures and tables, which count for 200 words each. Submissions in excess of these limits may be rejected without refereeing. The articles we deem within the theme and scope will be peer-reviewed and are subject to editing for magazine style, clarity, organization, and space. We reserve the right to edit the title of all submissions. Be sure to include the name of the theme or special issue you are submitting for.
Articles should have a practical orientation and be written in a style accessible to practitioners. Overly complex, purely research-oriented or theoretical treatments are not appropriate. Articles should be novel. IEEE Software does not republish material published previously in other venues, including other periodicals and formal conference/workshop proceedings, whether previous publication was in print or in electronic form.
The workshop targets practitioners and researchers interested or involved in distributed software development as well as tool vendors and tool developers.
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