Measuring Software Engineer Motivation in Globally Distributed Projects Līva Šteinberga University of Latvia liva.steinberga@lu.lv 1. Introduction and related work Software development today has become truly global as many individuals and teams from several geographically distant places collaborate to create software. Many organizations employ such model of work organization striving for the most effective software development in terms of speed, price and quality [1]. Global software development (GSD) approach claims to enable benefits of access to larger skilled resource pools, reduced development costs, proximity to markets and other ones [1]. However, we still hear frequent complaints about poor efficiency [2], which most often is explained by different communication, coordination and control problems caused by distance, temporal separation and socio-cultural problems inherent in GSD [3]. While it is very important to solve these problems, we argue that possibly even more attention should be paid to software engineer work motivation as it is reported to be the key determinant for retention and have large impact on productivity and software quality [4]. Motivation is commonly referred to as soft factor, which is difficult to address and even more difficult to measure [4]. Nonetheless, the importance of this factor is crucial. If motivation has the large impact on productivity and about 70% of all costs in software development are related to human resources [5], then the impact of even minimal improvements is evident. Empirical evidence suggests that improved project success directly relates to good project management, which is underpinned by human factors [6], including work motivation. The nature of offshore development and GSD projects puts new demands on managers, as such projects are significantly more complicated than even the most complex project managed entirely in-house [7]. Besides, work motivation might have cultural flavours, and it might be negatively affected by geographic and temporal distance. Contemporary managers working in globally distributed projects shall be equipped with sufficient knowledge about motivation in different GSD settings. To the best of our knowledge no empirical research focusing on addressing motivation in global software development projects exists. In order to be able to perform an extensive empirical study on motivation of software engineers working in globally distributed projects, first, we developed a survey on software engineer motivation, which was based on previously widely used and well-tested surveys. 2. Research objective The aim of this study is to develop a survey instrument to explore motivational needs and assessment of present work motivation of software engineers working in globally distributed projects. We expect that the survey results will provide us with better understanding of software engineer motivational needs and thus enable us to suggest ways to enhance motivation in order to achieve higher productivity and success ratio of distributed software projects. Our work is driven by the following research questions: RQ1: How to measure software engineer motivation? RQ2: Which aspects of project distribution are important in order to measure motivation of software engineers? 3. Research method In order to get a deeper understanding of the concept of work motivation we performed a literature analysis focusing on what has been explored regarding motivation in general and specifically in the context of software engineering, and distributed development. Particular attention has been devoted to the tools used for measuring motivation. As software engineer motivation is not widely studied and empirical research is scarce, the research literature for analysis was gathered according to snowball-sampling method [8], using Beecham’s et al. systematic literature review on software engineer motivation [4] as the starting source of references. The analyzed literature belonged to different research fields, like software engineering, organizational psychology and management. The analysis helped us to obtain the knowledge about previously widely tested tools for diagnosis of motivation. However, access to the tools themselves was limited as in the most of articles only research results were reported without providing direct access to the tools used. An exception was the work conducted by Hackman & Oldham and Morgeson & Humphrey [9, 10], which we would like to highlight as a comprehensive work design measure. Based on the gained knowledge we developed a survey for software engineers working in GSD projects comprising two types of questionnaires. 3.1. Questionnaire about project distribution The aim of the questionnaire about project and its distribution aspects was to explore the project settings and