Business needs often require software development to be distributed over many sites, often in different countries and continents. The authors introduce a quantitative method to assess the extent of the coordination problem in such environments by identifying tightly coupled work items, or chunks, that span several sites. They then propose a method to distribute the work among sites to minimize the need for coordination. The method distinguishes among parts of software that are not tightly coupled with each other by analyzing the work items that are recorded in software change management systems. The authors use this quantitative analysis to define a process for identifying chunks that are candidates to be moved to different sites for development.