Trust is important for effective coordination in global software development teams. However, the co-evolution of trust and coordination is often neglected. To fill the gap, we develop an evolutionary game theory model. Using the Behavior-Preference-Constraint (BPC) model and Adaptive Play, the model challenges the traditional view of trust as a static “resource” for coordination and proposes an alternative view that trust dynamically restricts people’s action choices in interacting with other team members.
Trust remains a key challenge for globally distributed teams despite decades of research. Awareness, a key component of collaboration, has even more research around it. However, detailed accounts of the interrelationship of awareness and trust are still lacking in the literature, particularly in the setting of software teams. The gap we seek to fill with this article is to examine how software tool support for awareness can engender trust among globally distributed software developers.
One of the many challenges of software development and maintenance is the need to collaborate among many constituents and stakeholders. For example, clients interact with software development organizations; software-development organizations consist of many developers and maintainers within the same location and across different locations; and the development organization often outsources some of the testing efforts to independent test agencies. Each of these parties may reside in different locations, often across many very disparate time zones.
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