Communication and Coordination Using Facebook: A Case Study of Distributed Software Development

Distributed Software Development (DSD) is becoming a norm in the software industry. Today, more software projects are being developed using geographically distributed teams. The team members in DSD must communicate and coordinate with each other to successfully develop software. This study explores Facebook as a mean for communication and coordination in DSD projects. We conducted an exploratory study to explore 1) how does informal communication take place among developers using various channels of Facebook? 2) Which channels are used for what type of communication? 3) How do team members use different features of Facebook to achieve coordination? We found that Chat and Comments were the most frequently used channels for formal and informal communication. Informal communication constituted one-fifth of the communication among team members. The socio-technical congruence score indicated a high degree of coordination among team members using Facebook. We, based on the results of the study, propose a usage model for DSD using Facebook as mean for communication and coordination.