Projects with team members located around the globe have become increasingly common in software, R&D, and business processes across all industry sectors. Improving the effectiveness and efficiency of virtual teams is therefore an increasingly business-critical issue. Issues associated with distributed development include:

• establishing, managing, and controlling virtual teams;
• supporting team members with tools for coordination, information sharing, and communication;
• organizing interdisciplinary projects;
• assigning tasks and achieving alignment; and
• motivating the team, addressing cultural differences, and other human factors.

While awareness of these issues can result in improved coordination, distributed work introduces huge coordination overheads. Research shows that, although computer-supported collaborative work has increased, many distributed teams aren’t benefiting from tools and approaches that currently exist. In other words, a lack of empirical data exists to demonstrate the feasibility of existing approaches in practice.

Although much research has focused on globally distributed teams, little is known about systematic, efficient, and empirically proven methods to establish a performing virtual team with regard to its management and tool support, as well as impacts on a team’s performance that can arise from human factors and cultural differences.

This special issue aims at collecting empirically validated solutions that help to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of virtual teams or that increase the quality of their outcomes. We invite contributions relating but not limited to

• solutions for establishing and managing virtual teams,
• measurement of virtual teams’ efficiency,
• social and human aspects in the context of distributed projects,
• processes and methods for distributed projects,
• tools to support distributed projects and virtual teams with empirical demonstration or validation of their impacts,
• evaluation of the feasibility (for example, by experimentation) of teaming approaches in global software development,
• hands-on examples that demonstrate the applicability of different solutions in practice, and
• industry experience, case studies, and field studies.

Each article should clearly outline the problem to be addressed, the solution or the findings, (at least) a proof of concept, and the options for transferring the solution/findings into practice.

For more information about the special issue, contact the guest editors:
Marco Kuhrmann (kuhrmann@in.tum.de)
Patrick Keil (patrick.keil@keil-ktm.com)
Darja Smite (darja.smite@bth.se)

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For general author guidelines: http://www.computer.org/software/author.htm

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To submit an article: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sw-cs