SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

An Empirical Study on Improving Trust among GSD Teams Using KMR
Mamoona Humayun
Department of computer Science and Technology
Harbin Institute of Technology,Harbin, China
mamoona@hit.edu.cn
Cui Gang
Department of computer Science and Technology
Harbin Institute of Technology,Harbin, China
cg@hit.edu.cn
Abstract—Trust is one of the key factors in successful software
development. However, achieving and maintaining trust in global
software development (GSD) projects is really hard because of the
inherent challenges in global software development; these challenges
include cultural diversity, inadequate communication, temporal
difference and knowledge management (KM). Many studies have
explored the role that trust plays in knowledge seeking and
acceptance, but very few have explored the role knowledge
management plays in building trust. In order to minimize the problem
of trust, we propose the use of Knowledge Management Repository
(KMR) that helps in building trusting working relationships among
GSD team members. This paper reports the results of a controlled
experiment that was conducted in an academic setting with two groups
of students to test the impact of KMR on trust. The results indicate that
applying KMR in GSD projects positively affects the trusting working
relationship among GSD teams. Study findings provide a substantial
understanding of trust, and the role KMR plays in building and
maintaining trust. In this paper, we discuss these findings and their
implications in GSD organizations.
Keywords-Global software Development, Knowledge management,
Knowledge Management Repository, Trust
I. INTRODUCTION
Global software developm ent is becom ing a norm in
software industry and orga nizations are now rapidly shifting
from a traditional form of c ollocated development to global
software development [1, 2] . There are a number of bene fits
and business reasons that motivate companies to shift from inhouse
development to GSD; these reasons include the late st
technologies, availability of resources and m ethodologies,
being closer to em erging markets, low cost, etc [3]. However
these benefits come with associated costs and c hallenges that
result in poor communication, lack of trust and coordination [4,
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11].
Trust is defined as the ‘‘the willingness of a party to be
vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the
expectation that the other will perform a particular a ction
important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or
control that other party” [28]. Trust is considered as one of the
most important factors in successful software development and
is essential within an orga nization for improving performance,
efficiency, productivity, creativity and the overall results
achieved. I n GSD, working in a trust ori ented environment
facilitates collaboration and co operation and encourages the
team members to work with a comm on purpose a nd shared
goals and thus achieve the desired results [4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12].
Improving communication and trust in GS D is im portant
and KM is considered as the be st means towards this end as
KM holds a central role in th e success of GSD projects [6, 14].
Trust has a direct relationship with knowledge and c ould not
occur without it [6, 13, 15, 16]. There is a need to use the latest
information and com munication technologies of kn owledge
sharing for building trust [9, 16, 17, 18]. Sometimes a sm all
amount of m issing knowledge causes a delay and even the
failure of the software project [6].
Therefore, keeping in view the importance of KM and Trust
for GSD based organizations; in this pape r we will study the
impact of KM R on building trust. KM R is an information
technology tool that prom otes knowledge sharing am ong GSD
teams and it is one of the comm only used practices of K M as
discussed in literature [17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24].
In the next section, we define the relation between
knowledge management and trust in the light of literature, and
we elaborate on the im portance of KM and trust in GSD
projects. In s ections III and IV the project overview and
research methodology are described. In section V, we present
the findings and assess ments of our data.Section VI
summarizes the main lessons learned from this research and
finally we conclude with suggestions for future research.
II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
GSD team members are unlikely to meet face-to-face due to
the nature of collaboration in a multinational organization and
cost saving strategies. Estab lishing and m aintaining trust in
GSD teams improve their effectiveness because tea m members
are generally not a ble to s pend much time in cr oss checking
and monitoring others.Positive interpersonal relationships and
shared experience help in building trust [4, 13, 16].
Knowledge management holds a central place in t he
development of trust am ong GSD team members. To develop
trust in GSD, there is a need to prom ote affective
communication, adopting knowledge sharing practices,
developing strong leadership and knowing and building
relationships between individuals [10, 16, 25, 26]. Missing trust
sometimes leads to the term ination of further co-operation and
relationships[25].
A survey was performed by NUS in 2007 in which more
than 30 nations were involved and the results obtained fro m
this survey point to an opportunity for governments from
developing nations to use KM as a key driver towards
increasing public sector pr oductivity and building tr ust in
government [14].
Information and communication technologies ar e
considered as the best m eans for im proving communication
and building trust am ong GSD teams [9]. A n intraorganizational
tool nam ed “trusty” is suggested for the
development and improvement of trust am ong GSD team s in
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