Evaluating Architectural Design Decision Paradigms in Global Software Development

Nowadays, Agile and Global Software Development (AGSD) has brought benefits and new challenges to the software industry. Among the main challenges is Architecture Knowledge Management (AKM), due to the following reasons: (i) in Agile Software Development team members prefer to convey knowledge in a face‐to‐face manner, over transmitting it through formal documents; and (ii) an efficient AKM in Global Software Development involves managing explicit knowledge. These opposite paradigms turn AKM into an unsolved issue in AGSD. In this study, the authors present a systematic mapping review about AKM in AGSD. From this review, they identified nine approaches that AGSD companies use to overcome the AKM challenge, which are grouped in three areas: (i) documentation artefact‐based, (ii) communication‐based, and (iii) methodological‐based. Also, they found that the selected papers evenly support the three phases of the integrated knowledge management cycle (creation/capture, sharing/dissemination and acquisition/application), although only 7% of them support the capture of architectural knowledge in a formalised way. Finally, they conclude proposing critical points to consider in the implementation of AKM solutions in AGSD, and presenting their directions of future work.

Cloud computing is being increasingly adopted in various domains for providing on-demand infrastructure and Software as a service (SaaS) by leveraging the utility computing model and virtualization technologies. One of the domains, where cloud computing is expected to gain huge traction is Global Software Development (GSD) that has emerged as a popular software development model. Despite several promised benefits, GSD is characterized by not only technical issues but also the complexities associated with its processes. One of the key challenges of GSD is to provide appropriate tools more efficiently and cost-effectively. Moreover, variations in tools available/used by different GSD team members can also pose challenges. We assert that providing Tools as a Service (TaaS) to GSD teams through a cloud-based infrastructure can be a promising solution to address the tools related challenges in GSD projects. Through an extensive review of the relevant literature on GSD and Cloud Computing, we have identified a set of quality attributes and potential architectural solutions for a cloud-based infrastructure that can provide TaaS to GSD teams. This paper outlines the promised benefits of TaaS to GSD teams, describes the expected quality attributes of a cloud-based infrastructure and how these quality attributes can be achieved. We also present a reference architecture for a cloud-based infrastructure to provide TaaS in GSD projects and describe its use with a detailed scenario of GSD projects.

Over the last two decades of globalisation, the software industry has witnessed the emergence of Global Software Development (GSD). Various business motives have driven software companies to outsource software development projects to software companies based in low cost economies. Given the highly competitive environment in which software companies operate, the client and the vendor have to equip themselves to operate successfully across national and international boundaries. Software development carried out at various geographical locations across boundaries is mainly impeded by distance which can be categorized as exterior and interior. The exterior distance is formed due to geographical, cultural and temporal differences while the interior distance is created due to organisational, technological and knowledge differences. The outcome of these distances is that they draw out primarily communication, coordination, culture and control issues which can spiral out of control if not resolved. The literature on GSD gives evidence as to how various tactics are applied to alleviate these issues created by global distance. While each of these is of interest to the GSD researchers, this research study has particular focus on coordination. Coordination is the act of making things work together for attaining common goals. In GSD projects, the mechanisms essential to coordinate the work and manage interdependencies may get disrupted. Hence appropriate coordination strategies are essential to achieve project goals when several actors are involved and multiple activities are performed. The explicit aim of the research presented in this thesis was to develop a GSDCOORD Model. The GSD-COORD Model comprises of specific processes with a defined set of strategies for coordination of tasks that can be followed by Project Managers when managing GSD projects. These strategies have emerged from literature, multiple case studies conducted in the vendor companies operating in India and mapped with the relevant sections of the PMBOK® Guide. This GSDCOORD Model is then validated by GSD researchers and experts from software companies in various countries. The validation process helped to evaluate the significance of each strategy in the model and its applicability. The GSD-COORD Model is an adaptable approach to project management where the processes and strategies can be tailored to suit different global and organizational settings.

Although agile methods in their purest way fit several companies, it has been a challenge to perform them in environments with distributed teams developing large software applications. Contractual items, for projects under development for external organizations, introduce additional complexities for pure agilebased approaches. The majority of global teams and companies use hybrid development practices that combine different development methods and frameworks. This research provides results from an empirical field study on how the hybrids practices are adopted in Global Software Development (GSD) projects. A systematic literature review was conducted to capture the status of combining agile with plan-driven in GSD projects. The results were limited to peer-reviewed conference papers or journal articles, published between 2001 and 2020. The present study selected 37 papers from five different bibliographic databases. In the end, 16 practices were summarized and described as hybrid by GSD projects. Based on the findings of this study, the authors can conclude that the contribution of this study is not only limited to identifying how hybrid development practices are applied in GSD but also allowing that practitioners can have a basis for adapting their development methods.

Global Software Development (GSD) has gained significant popularity as an emerging paradigm. Companies also show interest in applying agile approaches in distributed development to combine the advantages of both approaches. However, in their most radical forms, agile and GSD can be placed in each end of a plan-based/agile spectrum because of how work is coordinated. We describe how three GSD projects applying agile methods coordinate their work. We found that trust is needed to reduce the need of standardization and direct supervision when coordinating work in a GSD project, and that electronic chatting supports mutual adjustment. Further, co-location and modularization mitigates communication problems, enables agility in at least part of a GSD project, and renders the implementation of Scrum of Scrums possible.

Global Software Development (GSD) environment is based on a contractual relationship between client and vendor organizations in which a client outsources all or some part of its software development activities to a vendor. The vendor in return provides the agreed services in lieu of certain amount of remuneration. The main reasons to select the GSD technique include reduced cost, faster development and access to skilled manpower available across the world. Though GSD is emerging as an effective technique, but it suffers from many challenges like poor communication, lack of trust and coordination. These challenges pose serious risk to the smooth execution of the GSD projects. In the past decade, GSD has become an area of active research and a number of the researchers have worked on different aspects of it. In this paper, we present a critical review of the research studies conducted on GSD to highlight the challenges, best practices and benefits of GSD. Our findings reveal that much of the research in this area has been focused on addressing issues faced by client organizations, however, vendor side in the GSD relationship is much ignored due to which this field of study is still immature; hence, further research work is required to be undertaken to address the issues faced by the vendor organizations.

As agile methods and Global Software Development (GSD) are become increasingly popular, GSD project managers have been exploring the viability of using agile approaches in their development environments. Despite the expected benefits of using an agile approach with a GSD project, the overall combining mechanisms of the two approaches are not clearly understood. To address this challenge, we propose a conceptual framework, based on the research literature. This framework is expected to aid a project manager in deciding what agile strategies are effective for a particular GSD project, taking into account project context. We use an industry-based case study to explore the components of our conceptual framework. Our case study is planned and conducted according to specific published case study guidelines. We identify the agile practices and agile supporting practices used by a GSD project manager in our case study and conclude with future research directions.KeywordsAgile approachesGlobal Software DevelopmentCase study

Software development is a complex task, and the introduction of multi‐site development teams spread across the globe makes it even harder. Requirement changes during the software development process are inevitable, and failing to manage evolving requirements is one of the contributors to project failures. Requirements change management (RCM) becomes difficult in global software development (GSD) projects due to the need to communicate and coordinate between stakeholders in a distributed environment. This research work aims to identify the factors that have positive impacts on RCM activities in GSD. We conducted a multi‐vocal literature review (MLR) and a questionnaire survey study to identify the RCM success factors. The results of the t‐test (ie, t = 0.0347 and P = .700 > .05) and correlation (rs (25) = 0.573, P = .003) indicates that there is no significant difference between the findings of MLR and the questionnaire survey. The identified factors were further analyzed in the context of client and vendor organizations to better understand the RCM success factors in both types of GSD firms. The findings of this study can provide a useful framework for tackling problems associated with RCM in a GSD environment that is significant to the progression of GSD firms.

In global software development (GSD), teams from different geographies are involved in software development activities from requirement till management phase. There are many potential benefits associated with GSD environment such as development cost, round the clock development, accessibility to better skilled people and many others. Although, organizations are achieving the benefits of GSD but its challenging nature such as cultural and language differences, trust relationship, coordination and communication is introducing numerous challenges that cannot be ignored. These challenges are significantly influencing requirement engineering (RE) process in GSD. One of the reasons behind challenging nature of RE in GSD is varying situational contexts such as social, communication and cultural contexts, language, human, technical and management related contexts. This necessitate for a comprehensive framework that demonstrates the perspective of situational contexts. This study aims to review the existing situational RE frameworks, highlights the reported situational contexts and provide future research directions. The literature revealed that the situational contexts are commonly related to twelve categories that include stakeholders, organization, requirements, project, management, risk, culture, standard, task, communication, technique and methods, and innovation. The situational contexts related to these categories show the main standpoint of situational software development in GSD. These situational contexts are significant for improving competencies of the team members while performing RE process in GSD environment. This study also draws attention towards some imperative research directions for further studies in line of situational software engineering.

The benefits of using globally distributed sites for the development, maintenance, and operation of software-based systems and services are obvious. But global development also bears large risks. What seems at first to be economically reasonable often proves to be too expensive. Missing adjustment of communication and processes between different sites and insufficient knowledge of suitable management practices and organizational skills often lead to insufficient product quality. Global development and maintenance processes are difficult to control and often additional costs arise, especially for quality assurance and follow-up activities. Mastering global software projects requires, on the one hand, suitable tailoring of software development tasks and their distribution to different sites based on multiple criteria (not only cost!). On the other hand, appropriate process and management practices need to be established. Quantitative models can then be used to assess cost, schedule goals, and quality risks. I will introduce fundamental techniques for the establishment of well-understood and manageable distributed development processes and discuss different ways for managing risks. Based on a technique for splitting up development tasks and a multidisciplinary decision model for "smart" task distribution to different sites, I will demonstrate how distributed development processes can be organized in a productive way. This will be done by using examples from industry projects. Additionally, I will present upcoming topics such as cloud-supported global software development or the software factory, a research and development infrastructure at the University of Helsinki that supports systematic testing of novel distributed development techniques. Finally I will show how, in order to avoid global development risks, the application of fundamental software engineering principles must be emphasized.

Coordination of interdependent tasks across geographical, temporal and socio-cultural boundaries has been identified as a critical antecedent to global software development (GSD) team performance. Since GSD teams are increasingly required to achieve software development agility and respond to changing business requirements, conventional plan-driven software development methods become inadequate to manage the cross-boundary dependencies. To cope with this issue, there is an emerging trend of implementing change-driven agile methods in GSD; we call this practice agile GSD. This paper focuses on the formulation of coordination strategies in agile GSD. We argue that Coordination Theory (CT) can serve as a useful lens to develop a deeper understanding of the formulation process. We present a case study in a leading software development company using agile GSD and present preliminary results by applying the lens of CT.

Software engineering is largely concerned with the methodical, systematic production of quality software to support organizational goals. Despite significant advances in technology over the last decade, software engineering still heavily relies on human efforts and human interaction to generate economic contributions for an organization. In more recent years, the question of software service complexity has become central to Global Software Development (GSD) with a view of developing software across a global landscape. However, few efforts have surfaced to challenge the complexity of the relational infrastructure of software teams that support the development of software architecture. This is important in order to sustain and support lean software development and organisational structures particularly in an open service innovation environment. However, from a socio-economic perspective, there are few theoretical efforts that attempt to introduce new insights on how the human factors contribute towards a GSD value co-creation. The objective of this chapter is to examine the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and i* (i star) modelling techniques to examine how we could model the economic impact of software relational structures. The chapter explores how i* models leverage SNA concepts to model GSD development. This chapter also offers a discussion on the theoretical development of the socio-economics of GSD in an “open innovation” context.

Aim/Purpose: This paper aims to describe how various Kanban elements can help alleviate two prominent types of challenges, communication and collaboration in Global Software Development (GSD). Background: Iterative and Lean development methodologies like Kanban have gained significance in the software development industry, both in the co-located and globally distributed contexts. However, little is known on how such methodologies can help mitigate various challenges in that occur in a globally distributed software development context. Methodology: The study was conducted using a single-case study based on a general inductive approach to analysis and theory development. Through the literature review, collaboration and communication challenges that GSD teams face were identified. Data collected through semi-structured interviews was then inductively analyzed to describe how the case-study teams employed various Kanban elements to mitigate communication and collaboration challenges they face during GSD. Findings: The study found that some Kanban elements, when properly employed, can help alleviate collaboration and communication challenges that occur within GSD teams. These relate to Inclusion Criteria, Reverse Items, Kanban Board, Policies, Avatars, and Backlog. Contribution: The paper contributes to knowledge by proposing two simple concept maps that detail the specific types of communication and collaboration challenges which can be alleviated by the aforementioned Kanban elements in GSD. Recommendations for Practitioners: This paper is relevant to GSD teams who are seeking ways to enhance their team collaboration and communication as these are the most important elements that contribute to GSD project success. It is recommended that relevant Kanban elements be used to that effect, depending on the challenges that they aim to alleviate. Future Research: Future research can investigate the same research questions (or similar ones) using a quantitative approach.

The requirements elicitation is considered as one of the most critical tasks performed during the whole requirements engineering process. The requirements elicitation frameworks define a systematic structured way to perform requirements elicitation task during software development projects. The requirements elicitation in global software development projects becomes a more challenging task due to the high diversity in its participants. The pre-elicitation processes can be customized to better plane the requirements elicitation process for global software development contexts. This article presents a structured hierarchy of pre-elicitation processes for global software development-based requirements elicitation frameworks. The presented pre-elicitation processes hierarchy can be customized to apply for traditional requirements elicitation frameworks used for inhouse software development contexts.

Effective communication is an important issue for global software development. Due to geographical limitations and travel challenges, face-to-face meetings are expensive to schedule and run. Web-based communication methods are thus the primary means of communication in global software development efforts. In general, two types of web-based communication mechanisms exist: synchronous and asynchronous communications; each serves a unique role. In this paper, we present an empirical study of the communication mechanisms in GNOME GTK+, a small-sized open-source distributed software project, in which Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Mailing Lists are used as synchronous and asynchronous communication methods, respectively. The objective of this study is to identify how real time and asynchronous communication methods could be used and balanced across global software development projects.