Introducing Team Coordination Framework to Support Globally Distributed Teams for Pakistani Software Industry

Collaborative effort is required in DSD (Distributed Software Development) in order to develop software in manageable components. Immense effort is taking place due to the cultural, geographical and temporal distances among project teams in Pakistani Software Industry to this end. The purpose of this study is to propose a solution during DSD that will help the distributed teams in coordinating their activities. Our solution enhances the management associated activities and assists in optimal usage of team coordination in dispersed settings. The method that we used is single case study type, which involved distributed software business to assess the usefulness and efficiency related to Pakistan’s DSD industries, and has shown strong tendency of participants towards the effectiveness of proposed team coordination framework. Results indicate that the predictable solution will look up the group management, which is considered as a vigorous issue of Pakistani DSD industry. Furthermore, it will assist in resolving the problems of team coordination in distributed situation. One of the most significant current discussion about the proposed solution suggested that it helps in human communication methods team coordination in a distributed environment.


INTRODUCTION
DSD research is highly interested in different merits such as highly skilled and cheap labor which is available across the border and round the clock in a working environment [5]. The quality of software development increases in DSD rapidly due to optimal usage of resources and cost saving [6]. In spite of benefits, the pitfalls of DSD cannot be ignored i.e. communication, team coordination and controls are the major issues [1][2].
In the new global development environment, team coordination is a central issue for outsource organization [3][4]. Hence, team coordination arises problems such as Response delay, Spontaneous informal communication, and Knowledge sharing due to decentralized team members as mentioned in existing studies [4][5]. In addition, we extracted the issues for Pakistani software DSD organizations through survey. Therefore, these problems result in inadequate communication, coordination, allocation of circumstance and unfortunate approach into development behavior [7]. For exchanging necessary project information, coordination is needed in a diverse environment by software teams. It can be defined as "to attain the project goals the deed of performing together amicably and dealing with interdependencies of tasks in which numerous actors are involved and several activities are performed" [4,8].
Different teams are involved for the product development i.e. project management team, designing team, developer team etc. and all the teams work collectively. These teams coordinate for the organization and management of the production operations. Team coordination is an important determinant for team performance in software development especially in a disbursed environment. Team coordination is the interpersonal connections between members that are necessary for exchange of data, emerging and preserving communication designs and mutually agreed upon team up grades toward the constructing and conveying of an ordinary project [9].
Various activities in team coordination includes what has been done in software development such as effort coursework, assigning roles, work arrangement plus tasks, knowledge allocation and arranging processes [1,[10][11].
In DSD, there are various challenges like team coordination together with; problem in time zone differences, deficiency in collective ownership and trust, assignments of responsibilities and roles [12][13].
Hence in Pakistan for DSD the team coordination has played a vital role in project development and same major issues of team coordination are being faced by the software industry to attain the international standards of software development [14][15]. Therefore, team coordination raised issues in project management activities i.e. requirement analysis, architecture designing, development, unit testing etc. for synchronization of work [16][17].
It is approved that the coordination management is an additional action in DSD for the improvement of software development; as we conducted review in the Pakistani organization to identify the team coordination pitfalls.  [11], Iris is used to solve coordination practices with agile method in distributed spreading [18][19] social media tools like Dropbox, G+, skype, Facebook tool etc. are used for project development and monitoring across boundaries [1,[19][20]. Whereas, these is still need of efficient team coordination tools for better quality and higher customer satisfaction within limited resources as recommended by the Standish group report and version one report of UK instead of theoretical solutions.
All along by way of apparatus and structure, massive quan tity of coordination appar atuses n eeds modifications to provide standardized coordination procedure, mutual fine-tuning and direct management [6]. Hence, Continuous coordination by process slanting approaches and informal knowledge distribution tactics are available to deal with coordination issues [21]. We proposed a framework that merged communiqué, coordination and project management behavior all along with the improvement process stream to moderate the disbursed development trouble. Therefore, this study improves team coordination in disbursed Pakistani software industry and shifts our conceptual framework into practice.
In Section 2, we describe related work dealing with team coordination challenges. Section 3 elaborates the materials and methods. Section 4 presents the results and discussion of conducted case study and section 5 concludes the respective research. Finally, section 6 discusses the future work.

RELATED WORK
Some existing research has been proposed to manage the team coordination difficulties in DSD. A structure incorporating coordination activities is introduced [22] across boundaries in a disbursed team. to uphold online behavior of the whole day in the project [1]. Challenges about announcement, coordination, organization and information administration are described in [24]. Challenges as regards to announcement, coordination, organization and information administration are described in [25][26].
Literature and practitioners address the team coordination challenges by giving those assorted solutions intended for victorious team coordination behavior [17]. Email, scrum meetings and chat rooms are additional improvement practices for the victorious. Apart from the Github and Assembla a number of collaborative work spaces are also introduced to overcome team coordination issues [1]. Table 1 shows some problems of team coordination and their mitigation practices i.e. lack of face to face communication, Response delay, Cultural differences, Language difference etc. [1,[27][28][29][30]. Although existing proposed solutions have helped in a noteworthy way and provided with significant benefits, they still have some flaws that need improvements [3].
All along by way of the apparatus and structure massive quantity of coordination mechanisms are prolonged to be introduced. Some described coordination mechanisms are standardization, mutual adjustment and direct supervision [6]. Continuous coordination is another explicated novel mechanism that merges some formal i.e. process slanting approaches, and informal knowledge distribution approaches to deal with coordination challenges [26].
The study proposed a framework merging communiqué, coordination and project management behavior all along with an improved process stream to moderate the dispersed development trouble.

MATERIALS AND METHOD
After the review of previous work dealing team coordination challenges; we identified problems and solutions by presenting and proposing the framework to improve Team coordination. At the end, a case study was conducted to evaluate the proposed framework. The complete flow chart of research process portrayed in Fig. 1.

Introducing Team Coordination Framework to Support Globally Distributed Teams for Pakistani Software Industry
Team coordination has a vital impact in the success of any project. However, with the enormous amount of benefit, team coordination has some menaces in the Software industry of Pakistan [14][15]. The literature review has highlighted these challenges. These identified barriers are investigated and considered to be removed from the Pakistani Software Industry.
A framework has been proposed with a proper sequence of activities, which involves the improved practices of coordination throughout the development cycle.  Phase-VI: Later the reviews are conducted for deficiency elimination for formal review, and the validation report.
We use cloud environment for the implementation of our conceptual framework since cloud provides the presentation prototype (for proof of concepts and explaining design functionality) and exploratory prototype (to determine complications, elicit needs, clarify goals, compare design options) [24,40]. The purpose of the cloud paradigm is to eliminate installation that works towards reducing cost and presents other rewards such as trouble-free utilization, straight forward scalability, improved performance and cost minimization [24,40]. In order to avail these competent services of cloud, the proposed framework proposes that the project community will maintain their own cloud. The cloud will be rooted with the coordination mechanisms such as content versioning system, language translator, discussion forums etc.

Motivation for Using Cloud
Coordination is cheerlessly pretentious in geographic distances and are a series of attempts during DSD. This provides services, runtime binding and dynamic adaptation, diminishing of installation overhead at each location, centralized data existence, maintenance of services inventory, storage and retrieval of configurations [33]. Therefore, while keeping the current barriers of Pakistan Software Industry, usage of cloud approach will ensure the immense benefits of team coordination.

Tool Architecture
The ultimate goal of our research is to shift our conceptual framework into practice in order to provide proof of concepts. For our team coordination proposed framework to improve the team coordination for performance analysis used the N tiered model view architecture which used to change view-based architecture to action based architecture for formulating an abstract architecture [41] before heading towards tool's formation. The Fig. 3 shows architecture of the proposed system. Architecture is This support would be regarding to the deployment model of the cloud.

Tool Description
A tool is the architecture of team coordination proposed framework. The architecture serves as the high-level

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Evaluation of proposed solution is an imperative activity which cannot be overlooked. After providing the solution for the coordination problem in DSD, case study is adopted to evaluate the projected solution.

Case Study
An organization was selected to investigate the proposed phenomenon. Vendor based distributed software organization did not allow us to mention their name due to their privacy. Organization has offered many successful Questionnaires and interviews were the techniques used to gather information about the evaluation.
We selected the Rent a car company which developed same system with our Team coordination tool and MantisBT system approaches. Reviews are taken from team members, who used the proposed research solution in testing the selected case study. Reviews are taken to compare the results of both approaches. After the completion of the testing of case study, team members are given some parameters for the sake of evaluation.
Participants are asked about the parameters such as: user satisfaction, ease of use, improved efficiency, understand ability, improved team coordination and cost advantage.
The data of reviews from both the teams who developed project using our proposed framework presented in Tables   2-3     MantisBT is used to develop the selected system and proposed tool is used to test the system, so reviews are gathered to compare the effectiveness of team coordination of both systems. Fig. 6 shows results for proposed system and Fig. 7 shows results of compared system. It can be clearly seen in the difference graph that the proposed solution has improved the team coordination than the compared system.

CONCLUSION
Our contribution in research is discovery of the team coordination challenges due to sequential, environmental, cultural alterations and their recommended mitigation practices. This study improves team coordination in Pakistani disseminated progress of software. It is claimed that communication is a significant issue and must be improved for better collaboration amongst dispersed teams. Our team coordination proposed framework provides both theoretical and practical solution for the practitioners to improve quality, satisfaction and more foreign returns within limited resources. We used both formal and informal communiqué mechanisms for teams to collaborate effectively. This study reveals the stateof-practice DSD activities and cloud adoption in the context of Pakistani Software Industry. Our proposed framework also improving communication structure for better team coordination during working in Pakistani DSD environment. The results depicted that the conceivable solution enhanced team synchronization in DSD.

FUTURE WORK
In our future work, we will improve control and management of the vitality of requirements in a distributed environment, with mapping the change alongside its implementation. Similar investigations can be shown with a larger set of cases across the globe, which helps to increase the generalizability of our findings on cloud.
We also plan to perform an empirical study to confirm our findings in a large scale DSD industry.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work has been taken partially from Thesis (First Author). Authors are grateful for the support of parents and faculty of Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Authors would also like to thank Internal and External Referees, for their wisdom, suggestions and endless support, throughout our paper.

Instant Messages
Translators Task Assignment