Extended abstract: Comparing cultural models in the context of teaching global software engineering

The rise of globalization has driven new challenges to software engineering education. The industry scene today involves international acquisitions, project offshoring, and strategic alliances, which create the need for globally oriented students who can understand and function within the new business paradigm. This, subsequently, has brought about a burgeoning interest in cross-cultural research in global software engineering (GSW) education. Recent research points out that today's web-enabled platforms have eliminated geographical borders allowing the world to collaborate in multiple domains including education, research and development, innovation, production among others. In this context, research on cross-cultural dimensions is rapidly gaining momentum. Recently, GSW courses are being introduced at academic institutes as part of computer science and software engineering degree requirements. Collaborative GSW courses are mainly concerned with studying methodologies, tools, infrastructures, and other factors that influence distributed software development by culturally diverse teams. Cultural issues are among the factors that may affect the outcomes of GSW courses. Influences could be in productivity, trust, communication methods, and leadership of distributed teams. In the past 30 years, a considerable amount of literature has examined the definition and characteristics of culture, mostly from a person-task perspective, which is the extent to which cultures focus on human interaction as opposed to tasks to accomplish. The most referenced research of all literature on cultural dimensions in the context of GSW is that of Greet Hofstede, Project GLOBE, Trompenaars and Hampdeen-Turner, and Hall. Hofstede identified six major dimensions on which cultures may vary. Project GLOBE extended Hofstede's work to examine universally endorsed, universally unendorsed, and culturally contingent behaviours across the different cultures. Both studies are considered landmarks in cross-cultural research because they have taken cross-cultural research to an advanced level by exploring cultures that were never considered in the previously American-dominated literature of cultural research. However, more efforts are needed to identify drivers of productivity in culturally diverse teams within context-specific settings. This paper attempts to identify contextual factors that support or inhibit productivity within distributed teams, especially those located in regions that are under-researched, like the Middle East.