Systematic Literature Review on Global Software Development Risks in Agile Methodology

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.

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.

CONTEXT - Global software development (GSD) is a modern business strategy for the development of high quality software. The main reason for selecting GSD or offshore outsourcing technique include faster development, reduced cost and access to large pool of skilled manpower. In today's world of engineering development, most of the outsourced projects suffer from unwanted threats called risks that can badly affect the cost, quality and schedule of the critical projects. Appropriate measure should be planned for the successful offshore development outsourcing projects. OBJECTIVE - The objective of this protocol is to identify the potential risks that are considered to be critical and having high probability of occurrence concerning offshore country selection for software outsourcing and that will assist the clients organization in selection of suitable offshore country worldwide. METHOD - These potential risks will be identified using a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). SLR is a technique of identifying, evaluating and interpreting all the relevant research that is available to a particular research question or topic of interest and has different types of scientific values that differentiate it from ordinary literature surveys and reviews. EXPECTED OUTCOME - We have been developed SLR protocol for offshore country selection risk management model (OCSRMM) and now in the implementation phase. The expected outcomes of SLR review will be the identification and analysis of potential risks to be addressed by client organizations for appropriate management and mitigation of offshore software development contracts. Our ultimate goal of this research is to develop OCSRMM and to design the structured plan for the development of this model. Keywords - Global Software Development, Systematic Literature Review, offshore software development

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.

Systematic literature review and empirical investigation of barriers to process improvement in global software development: Client–vendor perspective

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.

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.

The software development industry or organizations increasingly emerging day by day have adopted global software development (GSD) practices due to the large significance of outsourcing. These industries face many challenges due to a lack of understanding customer perspective in the GSD environment. For any organization, the customer is the major stakeholder, and customer relationship management (CRM) plays a vital role in customer satisfaction with software development projects. These challenges create serious risks for any software development project’s success. Thus, CRM is a crucial challenge in the success of software projects in the GSD environment. This research study aims to address the factors that negatively influence CRM implementation in the global context and proposes a conceptual model based on the identified factors for enhancing software product quality. The systematic literature review (SLR) phase investigates the potential barriers to CRM implementation in GSD. Based on identified barriers, an initial conceptual model is developed. The proposed conceptual model is validated using a questionnaire survey of the GSD industry and CRM practitioners of Pakistan. Statistical analysis and several suitable tests are also performed to develop the final conceptual model for CRM implementation in the GSD environment. This research is performed from the client’s perspective. The results are promising and accommodating to avoid any software project failure due to customer-related issues in a GSD environment.

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.

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.

To be successful with global software development (GSD), development knowledge needs to be shared among the developers and stakeholders, and the quality of the exchanged information must be assured. Therefore, mature processes, methods and tools have to be in place. If a unified and integrated solution does not exist, this impedes the exchange of knowledge (and the migration of people between projects). In GSD, such a diversity can lead to new problems: offshore development teams have to repeatedly re-adjust to method variants used by the respective business units. This can lead to misinterpretation of information and risks for project success. We report on re-aligning the varying software engineering methods and unifying the methodology throughout Capgemini sd&m. We also standardized quality assurance procedures and tightly integrated them with the engineering methodology. By this, we arrived at a comprehensive company-wide Enterprise Software Engineering Model that effectively supports knowledge transfer from clients to the onshore and offshore team.

Putting Requirements and Quality at the Core of Global Service Delivery: Current Efforts and Future Plans at Pace University

Chapter 6 Global Software Development: Origins, Practices, and Directions

Global software development (GSD) is considered as the coordinated activities of software development that are geographically and temporally distributed. The management of architectural knowledge, specifically, architectural design decisions (ADDs), becomes important in GSD due to the geographical, temporal, and cultural challenges in global environments. Based on our previous work on ADD management in localized software development, we present five ADD paradigms for GSD projects with different organizational structures. We also investigate the benefits and the challenges of these ADD paradigms by conducting an evaluation of the paradigms using extensive archived semi-structured interview data from industrial GSD projects. We aim to provide a fundamental framework for managing ADD documentation and evolution in GSD, as well as offer useful insights into managing architectural knowledge in a global setting.

Global software development efforts have increased in recent years, and such development seems to have become a business necessity for various reasons, including cost, availability of resources, and the need to locate development closer to customers. However, there's still much to learn about global software development before the discipline becomes mature. This special issue aims to assess the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice. It presents five articles that cover various aspects of global software development, including knowledge management strategies, distributed software development, requirements engineering, distributed requirements, and managing offshore collaboration. A Point/Counterpoint department discusses whether global software development is indeed a business necessity.This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.