Ci&T and PUCRS signed an agreement for research funding

The objective of the research is to develop the ability to enable high performance team building throughout distributed software development.

The focus of this graduation level research at PUCRS is to develop and improve techniques and strategies to build high performance teams in a distributed software development environment, using physical proximity simulations and agile methodologies. The research also intends to bring new solutions to the natural issues of this sort of activities, such as time zone, physical distance and different languages.

The research funding is part of the Ci&T's Innovation Program, which works on the cooperation and integration between the corporate environment and the universities, among other initiatives. "The search for adding internal and external skills to overcomeinnovative challenges is part of the Open Innovation concept implemented in the program", says Flávio Pimentel, Ci&T's executive leading the Innovation Program in the company.

Fernando Ostanelli, project coordinator and manager of the agile methodology development center at Ci&T explains that the global integration of teams isn't a reality in the IT industry yet, but it's fundamental to support the globalization strategy of the company and to shorten the distance with the customers. "After all, a global company is not a set of islands, but a comunity of integrated people", he says.

According to Ostanelli, the choice of PUCRS ocurred because of the background and proximity of this university with the IT market. In this institution, the coordinator is Rafael Prikladnicki, an specialist in this subject and one of the coordinators of the Distributed Software Development Research Group of PUCRS (Grupo MuNDDos, in Portuguese), founded in 2001 at the Computers School. Its mission is to develop research related to Global Software Engineering.

"The agreement is an important step in the Brazilian IT industry enabling the companies to operate in the global market. PUCRS has been developing researches in this field for more than 10 years, but always with multinational companies with offshore operations in Brazil. The partnership with Ci&T is a sign that this field has becoming relevant and fundamental for the Brazilian companies targeting the global market as well", says Prikladnicki.

The agreement was presented yesterday.