New Angles for Global Software Engineering Research? - Keynote Summary

In the late 1990s the Software Engineering community recognized that there was a problem with delivering global software projects to a high quality in an efficient manner. As a consequence, researchers, in the now ´Global Software Engineering Research community´, carried out significant studies into GSE problems. But, did we really find what we expected? Did we expect that project delays were due solely to technical software engineering problems? Did we really think that software engineering techniques could resolve all GSE problems? Maybe that is what we expected but that is not what we found. Of course Software Engineering techniques can solve some of the problems! However, the reality is that many of the issues we now discuss within the GSE community are social and socio-technical. We talk about culture and communication. We consider gender issues. Project management is high on our agenda. And what this portrays is the interdisciplinary nature of GSE research.