Establishing a Globally Distributed Software Development System in Academic Settings: An Ergonomic Perspective

Global software development is increasingly becoming common practice in the software industry. The ability to develop software at remote sites allows organizations to ignore geographic distances and to benefit from access to a rich resource pool at reduced costs. Recently, global software engineering projects are being introduced at academic institutes as part of computer science and software engineering degree requirements. There are many challenges associated with managing and executing globally distributed software projects in academic settings. In this paper, we will attempt to analyze the framework and components of a collaborative global software engineering system in academic settings from an ergonomic perspective. In our analysis we will apply the Concentric Ring Model to conduct the analysis. This model will allow us to examine the different challenges pertaining to users, machines, workspace, environment and the interlacing factors like time zones, cultural diversity of users, location barriers, in addition to gender issues which are particularly pertinent to Kuwait. The uniqueness of the proposed research lies in two main areas: it examines collaboration between Kuwait and the US; and it investigates the proposed topics from an ergonomic perspective.