A case study of student software teams using computer-supported software

This article discusses a case study of an on-going project to investigate how the performance of global software teams may be affected by cultural factors. Participants in the study included computer science students from the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton, Texas and students from the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. Students were divided into culturally diverse work-teams and assigned collaborative software development projects. Cultural distinctions between work-teams were based upon the students' responses to the cultural perspectives questionnaire (CPQ) developed by Maznevski, et al. Completed projects were evaluated with respect to several criteria, such as whether objectives were met, design efficiency and documentation completeness. Results from the study indicate that a work-team's cultural composition is a predictor of a work-team's performance. These and other questions are being addressed in our next round of studies.