International Journal of Inventive Engineering and Sciences (IJIES) ISSN: 2319–9598, Volume-1 Issue-1, December 2012 5 Retrieval Number: A0101121112/2012©BEIESP Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering & Sciences Publication Abstract—In the challenging field of software project development, the work is invariably performed by teams. In today’s world of privatization and globalization, where the development costs are increasing at a breakneck speed, the focus is now on cost reduction and availability of highly motivated and suitably trained workforce. Keeping the above mentioned parameters in mind, Companies worldwide are relying on virtual software teams to do the work. This paper highlights the characteristics and throws light on the specifics of virtual software teams. It also illustrates some of the most common issues and challenges that virtual teams face while working on a project there by exposing some of the ground realities as de scribe the most. Key words : Cohesion, Complexity Factor, CSCW, Cultural Difference, Face-to-Face Interaction, Satisfaction, Socio-Emotional Process, Virtual Team. I. INTRODUCTION A. Social Aspects of Software Development The software development process would not be possible without human beings who handles the tasks of requirement specification, analysis, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation. Therefore, the success of software development depends on the human factor involved in it, specifically on the complex relationships that exist among the people that collaborate in order to deliver the product successfully. It is also considered that software development is essentially a social discipline and give psychological views to programming and software development. The cross-scientific research settings should be created more to better understand the group and personal psychological factors that plays essential role in software development. The team-level social processes may be a better predictor for team performance than the production methods explains theories from group psychology to management science can provide insights into how software development teams can improve their work practices by not only considering technical choices. Therefore, the importance of social factors in software development is enormous. Because of this, organizations need to investigate relationships between team members and give special notice to the development teams and the complexities and problems they face every day(Ref. 2). Manuscript received on December 16, 2012. Dillip Kumar Mahapatra, Associate Professor, Department of Information Technology, Krupajal Engineering College, Bhubaneswar (Orissa), India. Tanmaya Kumar Dash, Asst. Prof., Deptt. Computer Science & Engineering, C.V.Raman College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar (Orissa), India. Gurudatta Lenka, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Krupajal Engineering College, Bhubaneswar (Orissa), India. II. VIRTUAL VS. TRADITIONAL SOFTWARE TEAMS Software engineering is a technical as well as a social discipline. However an organization is implementing traditional, distributed, virtual, or global software development project, the crucial building block of the project are the developer teams. A team can be defined “a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and who are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems (for example, business unit or the corporation), and who manage their relationship across organizational boundaries” (Ref. 2). In the traditional, co-located software development, the work is performed by traditional or face-to-face teams. Therefore, a traditional team would be a collection of co-located individuals who perform tasks and have responsibilities. Similarly, virtual software teams are the work units of distributed, virtual, or global software development. However, they operate across time, geographical locations and organizational boundaries and are linked by communication technologies. A virtual team may be defined as “a team whose members use the Intranet, Intranets, Extranets and other networks to communicate, coordinate and collaborate with each other on tasks and projects even though they may work in different geographical locations and for different organizations”. However, the most important distinction between virtual and traditional teams is that the members of a virtual team are distributed across geographical locations. It is experienced that, in contrast to traditional teams, virtual teams are very dynamic because they are prevalently formed as the need arises and disassembled when the task is complete (Ref. 3). III. VIRTUAL TEAM CHARACTERSTICS The virtual teams are assembled and disassembled very dynamically, there is very little prior team history and work culture and responsibilities of team members vary with each new virtual team they are appointed to. Savage points out that the structures of virtual teams are typically non-hierarchical and decentralized. Moreover, virtual team members are prevalently dependent on lateral and informal information exchange to perform the tasks. The virtual team has to manifest following characteristics (Ref. 1):  It is a set of culturally and organizationally differentiated members. Utilizing Virtual Software Teams for Inconsistency Management in Distributed Software Development Dillip Kumar Mahapatra, Tanmaya Kumar Das, Gurudatta Lenka