An Empirical Study of Motivational Factors for Distributed Software Development Teams

Distributed Software Development (DSD) has become a common approach for many organizations nowadays. This model of work enables better completive advantages, by reducing the overall development costs, shortening the time-to-market and enabling the access to professional resources in a global scale, among others. But there are challenges to be faced in DSD, and Team Motivation is an approach for dealing with its issues. This work has the objective of perform an empirical study on eleven motivational factors proposed by Farias Junior et al. for DSD teams. To achieve this goal, an online survey form was proposed for DSD professionals and researchers, to obtain their perception on the relevancy of these motivational factors. The results include the opinions of the participants and our analysis on these findings. DSD professionals and researchers can benefit from this work by using the findings as a reference for adoption of these motivational factors within their development projects or as a reference for future studies.