Interpersonal Trust in Virtual Software Development Teams: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Context: The progress of Information and Communication Technologies has greatly promoted the relationships among people of different geographical regions. Under this novel context, new settings of software development arise, known as virtual teams, a team of geographically dispersed developers. Objective: to assess the impact of virtual team’s interper-sonal trust on software development process. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study of peer-reviewed literature up to August 2016. Results: We reviewed 41 primary studies. Some highlights are that virtual team effectiveness is the most affected aspect by the lacking of interpersonal trust, while face-to-face meeting is the most mentioned work strategy to mitigate this problem. Conclusions: This study corroborates the impact of interpersonal trust on virtual software development teams. We identified some work strategies but few advanced tools to mitigate the problems derived from the lack of interpersonal trust.