Dr. Dobb's Journal October 2006
These days, the adage "it's a small world" means more than bumping into a pal from high school or spinning around in a teacup at Disneyland. In fact, the world just seems to have become smaller, thanks in part to advanced communication technology and what's euphemistically referred to as the global marketplace.
In this environment, nationalities and geographical boundaries mean little. Heck, even professional football in the U.S. has Australian kickers, following the lead of professional basketball's European players (not to mention the likes of Yao Ming). And criminy, even that great American event, the Johnsonville Brat Eating Championship, was won this year by Japan's Takeru Kobayashi who ate 58 bratwurst in 10 minutes. This after his winning Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog contest by downing 53 hot dogs in just 12 minutes.
Of course, globalization isn't anything new to the software development industry. For good or bad, programmers have led the way to globalization, thanks to technologies and business models that have embraced distributed development. In such cases, it doesn't matter if your project peers are in the next cube, the next building, or on the other side of the world. To witness this trend, you only have to look at the articles in this issue of DDJ that are contributed by developers from Norway, Israel, Great Britain, Canada, Serbia and Montenegro, and (oh yes) the U.S.
Putting aside inflammatory issues such as offshore jobs replacing domestic ones, there's undeniably a big jump in offshore programming resources. According to recent surveys from Evans Data and IDC, there are approximately 12 million professional developers worldwide, a number that's expected to grow to 17 million by 2009. Of that 5 million increase in developers, 3.2 million are expected to be in the Asia/Pacific and Europe/Middle East/Africa HASH(0x180c8d8), and 1.5 million in the Brazil/Russia/India/China HASH(0x180c8d8) (assuming I interpreted their data correctly).
As you might expect, this follow-the-sun shifting puts stress—and lots of it—on development teams and organizations. Such stress can involve: communication; managing requirements, change, and quality; integrating external team members; managing change; project management; and the like. In one of those highly scientific polls that we so often like to conduct, we recently asked folks what they thought were the "biggest challenges to globally collaborative development projects." The choices were: geography and times zones, language and culture, development tools, or effective project management. By a wide margin, responders saw effective project management as the greatest challenge.
Granted, project management is a big challenge, particularly when it involves different cultures, time zones, and the like. However, distributed collaborative development also demands the right tools. This is something former DDJ technical editor Eugene Kim pointed out in his "A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools" (http://www.ddj.com/184405649). In a nutshell, Eugene identified four necessary steps for improving collaborative tools:
Even though Eugene wrote his article two-plus years ago, it's more true today than ever before. Clearly, Eugene recognized then what we're beginning to realize now—that a small world is indeed a big deal.
Jonathan Erickson
Editor-in-Chief
jerickson@ddj.com