Who are we doing global software engineering research for?

Twelve years ago a group of practitioners and researchers came together to try to solve problems relating specifically to Global Software Engineering (GSE) practice. This paper aims to assess whether the many hundreds of GSE research papers written over this period have had an impact on practice. We conducted semi-structured interviews with senior managers and project managers from ten companies, four of which are large multinationals (three in Fortune 100); four are medium sized enterprises, and two are small startups. GSE research is perceived as useful by industry with all participants stating that studying the subject would improve GSE performance; but all were unanimous in saying they did not read articles on GSE. Practitioners go to books, blogs, colleagues, forums, experience reports of 1-2 pages in length, or depend on their own experience to solve problems in GSE. Controversially, many didn’t see GSE as separate from general project management. Practitioners don’t want frameworks; they want patterns of context specific help. While dissemination techniques need to be improved, that is not sufficient. Experience-based advice is just as important.