Studying the influence of culture in global software engineering: thinking in terms of cultural models

Culture appears to have a greater influence on software-engineering practice than originally envisioned. Many recent studies have reported that cultural factors greatly impact global software-engineering (GSE) practice. However, many of these studies characterize culture as a set of dimensions (e.g., Hofstede's), which significantly limits the meaning of culture. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of such a dimensional approach to studying culture by highlighting the aspects of culture that such dimensions fail to capture. Next, we present the idea of thinking of culture in terms of cultural models (inspired by Shore's work), and illustrate this idea by presenting cultural models adopted by the software-engineering domain. Then, based on this idea of cultural models, we present a conceptual reference framework for studying the influence of culture in the global software-engineering setting. Finally, we present some examples that use this framework, which illustrates the benefits of such a framework for studying culture's influence on GSE practice.