The goal of this workshop is to provide an opportunity for researchers and industry practitioners to explore both the state-of-the art and the state-of-the-practice in global software development (GSD). Increased globalization of software development creates software engineering challenges due to the impact of temporal, geographical and cultural differences, and requires development of techniques and technologies to address these issues. The workshop will foster interaction between practitioners and researchers and help grow a community of interest in this area. Practitioners experiencing challenges in GSD will share their concerns and successful solutions and learn from research about current investigations. Researchers addressing GSD will gain a better understanding of the key issues facing practitioners and share their work in progress with others in the field.

/pdf/addressing-the-challenges-of-software-industry-globalization-4hlb5r1d30.pdf

Addressing the challenges of software industry globalization: the workshop on global software development

Recent advances in information technology have made Internet-based collaboration much easier. It is now possible for a software team to draw on talented developers from around the world without the need to gather them together physically. However, being able to tap into a large pool of talent does not guarantee success. Software managers have to be able to manage these distributed teams. They need to define sharper processes and ensure that they are followed. They also need to better control project execution. To do so effectively, we have developed a tool that integrates features for both project and process management. Existing project management tools were originally designed for projects on a single site. Many of them do not provide the features necessary to support cooperative multi-site software projects or process management. We have developed a tool, called IPPM, which supports these features. IPPM, which integrates features for process and project management, resolves differences between existing project and process tools, and provides a number of unique features to support multi-site development. IPPM has been implemented and used by several development teams working in different regions in Hong Kong and Mainland China.

Integrating Process and Project Management for Multi-Site Software Development

A large software project may be distributed over multiple sites when the organization believes that there are not enough people to staff a single collocated team. However, previous empirical research in the context of telecommunication organizations has shown that distance may increase cycle time and costs. We report on a large software massive maintenance project in the information systems domain, which in part has been carried out on a single site and in part across multiple sites of the same organization. We performed a comparative postmortem analysis of the two parts. Our results show that, with respect to cycle time and cost no significant differences exist among the distributed and collocated work. Indeed there is a significant difference in communication during the project. This implies that for massive maintenance activities the distribution over multiple sites can be really helpful.

/pdf/an-empirical-study-of-distributed-software-maintenance-4thoolomy6.pdf

An empirical study of distributed software maintenance

Coordination in software projects is a challenge, particularly when it comes to distributed software development (DSD). Agile software development is a well-known paradigm for improving software development; however, there is little understanding of its impact on DSD projects. This paper describes an empirical study conducted within two Software Factory settings in Finland and Italy to investigate how Scrumban can impact coordination in geographically distributed software development. It provides the results from a project case that applied Scrumban to develop a web-based application for Time-banking. This study shows that aspects of Scrumban, such as iterative development, enhanced visibility, and limited work-in-progress, would alleviate the challenges of leveraging resources, synchronization between distributed sites, communication, and culture. It also explains that technical and security issues in the coordination of distributed projects may demand for solutions other than Scrumban.

An empirical study on the impact of Scrumban on geographically distributed software development

Towards Distributed GQM

This paper discusses a global environment for support of distributed concurrent software development with an emphasis on sharing design information. There are many issues to be resolved in global software development such as communication gaps between distributed sites, guaranteed access to the latest information and specification and design resources, accurate and flexible coordination of project tasks, and a work environment that is independent of the infrastructure at the sites. The mechanism whereby concurrent development and concurrent workflow management are synchronized should be the key point. We propose our approach to sharing design information with respect to the above issues. We adopt Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) the international standard for document description and exchange of electronic documents, as our design document standard. We introduce a sophisticated document management system to support information sharing, and many information-sharing applications that can be effectively realized by using the features of SGML.

K. Nakamura

Papers

Distributed and concurrent development environment via sharing design information