“Culture is one thing and varnish is another.”

and managed by those members. Theoretically and methodologically, many of the existing explanations of the unique nature of outsourced software development pertain to ideal and abstract notions of culture, communication, distribution and complexity. Risk management, in this perspective, becomes a set of practices that deal with culture, communication, distribution and complexity, e.g. In contrast, this paper aims to show how the practices involved in risk management (among other things) is part of a “common software engineering culture” constituted by work practices that makes a naively rational view on the software development process work, after all and on the contrary of the stipulated process, and this especially being the case for globally outsourced projects.

3 RESEARCH METHOD AND ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

This paper is based on a study carried out in 2005. It concerns the usage of methods in a globally distributed development environment of a company involved in developing mobile content provisioning services. This is not a very large corporation, yet they employ approximately a hundred people, of which half are software developers in an Eastern European country. The locally based operation in Oslo, Norway is mainly occupied with sales and marketing, targeting customers all over the world and clearly just as successful in the US as in Europe, and even more so in East Asia. In East Asia, moreover, they have an outsourcing relationship (from the point-of-view of their East-European subsidiary) going with a smaller development organization.

The data collection for this paper consisted of face-to-face interviews with five managers at various levels from CEO to consultant at the local site of the company, plus questionnaires. The interviews were relatively open, yet structured by an interview guide which aimed to bring about coverage of questions regarding the use of methods, documentation practices and innovation in the company. In order to reach the developers and the managerial level abroad, a web-based questionnaire was developed. Twelve people responded to the questionnaire, more than half of which (7) are locally based, working with various managerial responsibilities. For instance, one is responsible for editing a content provisioning web-site and another for liaisoning with large media companies, production companies, and Hollywood studios. Most of the local respondents describe themselves as product managers. Their responsibilities comprise the “integration of mobile interactivity into their customers’ overall communications strategies”, which could entail testing handsets, compiling suites of content, marketing and writing up requirements, or even consulting. Five respondents are based at the outsourcing location “offshore”, working with requirements engineering and project management. It is important to emphasize that the aim of the questionnaire was not to perform quantitative analysis or test a hypothesis with statistical significance. This might be a fruitful approach in future research, for which this first round will work as a pilot. However, at this stage, it was considered simply to be a reasonably cost-effective approach to carrying out interviews ‘at a distance’.

The analysis of this paper, quite in contradistinction to the much of the previous work on outsourcing, which due, probably, to the global nature of the outsourcing phenomena has taken a much more ‘macro’ perspective, is based on the participants’ own reflection, accounts and ‘shared-and-taken-for-granted’ knowledge of the situation. In this respect, it is heavily influenced by ethnomethodology.

In most research papers in IS and related fields, one will find that ethnomethodology is most commonly associated with ethnographic data collection. Data and experiences upon which ethnomethodological analysis are based usually come from ‘shadowing’ the actors, and it is often believed that ‘naturally occurring’ data do carry particular import to such analysis. Participant observation is, with its emphasis on ‘real-world, real-time’ of course at the very heart of ethnography, which, in the next instance, lends itself, at least on the surface, nicely to an ethnomethodological analysis since it focuses on the local circumstances and socially observable accounts of work ‘as-and when’ it is carried out (Crabtree et al. 2000). This is not predominantly the case for this paper. The question (and perhaps objection), then, becomes naturally, is it possible to do an ethnomethodologically informed analysis based on a mix of face-to-face and web-form based interview-data? We realize that this is an approach that might strike a lot of people as odd, but must then refer to the rich variety of experimental approaches applied in ethnomethodology for support (Garfinkel 1967).