Establishing Personal Trust-based Connections in Distributed Teams

TL;DR

This paper investigates how social communication influences trust in distributed software teams, proposing a model that links communication, trustworthiness assessment, and project performance based on collaboration history.

Contribution

It introduces a research model connecting social communication and trust in distributed teams, using collaboration history as an objective performance measure.

Findings

Social communication enhances trustworthiness assessment.

Trust correlates with successful collaboration history.

Model improves understanding of trust dynamics in distributed teams.

Abstract

Trust is a factor that dramatically contributes to the success or failure of distributed software teams. We present a research model showing that social communication between distant developers enables the affective appraisal of trustworthiness even from a distance, thus increasing project performance. To overcome the limitations of self-reported data, typically questionnaires, we focus on software projects following a pull request-based development model and approximate the overall performance of a software project with the history of successful collaborations occurring between developers.