  Given the relevance of coordination in the field of global software
engineering, this work was carried out to further understand coordination
mechanisms. Specifically, we investigated meetings and the collaboration tool
Slack. We conducted a longitudinal case study using a mixed-methods approach
with surveys, observations, interviews, and chat logs. Our quantitative results
show that employees in global projects spend 7 hours 45 minutes per week on
average in scheduled meetings and 8 hours 54 minutes in unscheduled meetings.
Furthermore, distributed teams were significantly larger than co-located teams,
and people working in distributed teams spent somewhat more time in meetings
per day. We found that low availability of key people, absence of
organizational support for unscheduled meetings and unbalanced activity from
team members in meetings and on Slack were barriers for effective coordination
across sites. The positive aspects of using collaboration tools in distributed
teams were increased team awareness and informal communication and reduced the
need for e-mail. Our study emphasizes the importance of reflecting on how
global software engineering teams use meetings and collaboration tools to
coordinate. We provide practical advice for conducting better meetings and give
suggestions for more efficient use of collaboration tools in global projects.
