Due to the progress in information and communication technologies, virtual teams have been widespread developed and adopted. People in different time zones and long-distance places can accomplish the same mission together with the help of virtual tools. It thus forces enterprises to review their structures and systems in their organization for accommodating to globalization economic. The concepts of accomplishing task via virtual team are spreads widely and rapidly in the business circle. It evoked many researches but most of these focused on the issues of communication among virtual team members or the computer-aided of forming groups, etc. There are few researches relative to virtual teams structure and their performances. In this study, we try to explore how the structure of virtual team influences their performances and discover whether the operational process affects the performances. The operational process in a virtual team will also be involved with knowledge management activities such as information gathering & dissemination and knowledge sharing. In this thesis, we explore the relationship among the virtual teams¡¦ structure, operational process, performances and knowledge sharing. The observation groups are 10 virtual teams from a class of Cyber University of NSYSU (http://cu.nsysu.edu.tw). Survey and content analysis research method were adopted to develop and analysis the datum collection and analysis. The finding of this study has proposed an integrated model, which was constructed by the concepts of virtual team¡¦s structure, team process, performances and knowledge sharing. This model may offer a concept as a reference for further research of virtual teams.

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Agile software development methods are characterized by developer’s empowerment through self-organization, incremental requirements and constant knowledge sharing. Despite some effort to elaborate how successfully agile methods can be applied in co-located development teams, little is known on how the same is done when the development teams are distributed. Our research focus is to uncover factors that influence the successful application of agile methods in distributed development teams using a software development company as our case study. With three distributed teams applying different agile methods, we conducted focused ethnography alongside interviews to comprehend what and how various factors under distributed development teams influence successful agile methods application. It seems, all that matters is team structure, team spirit, effective communication, product requirements, and knowledge sharing. The team structure has more influence than other factors and therefore our suggestions for successful application of agile methods in distributed software development is to focus on the development team, above all factors. The analysis shows that the development methods themselves have little to do with the successful application of agile methods in distributed software development teams.

Complex environments like the United States Air Force's advanced weapon systems are highly reliant on externally developed software, which is often delivered late, over budget, and with fewer benefits than expected. Grounded in Galbraith's organizational information processing theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between software development team structure, ambiguity, volatility and software project failure. Participants included 23 members of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association in the southeastern United States who completed 4 project management surveys. Results of multiple regression analysis indicated the model as a whole was able to predict software project failure, F(3,19) = 10.838, p < .001, R2 = 0.631. Software development team structure was the only statistically significant predictor, t = 2.762, p = .012. Implications for positive social change include the potential for software development company owners and military leaders to understand the factors that influence software project success and to develop strategies to enhance software development team structure.