An exploratory study in communication in Agile Global Software Development

Global software development (GSD) is gaining ever more relevance. Although communication is key in the exchange of information between team members, multi-site software development has introduced additional obstacles (different time-zones and cultures, IT infrastructure, etc.) and delays into the act of communication, which is already problematic. Communication is even more critical in the case of Agile Global Software Development (AGSD) in which communication plays a primary role. This paper reports an exploratory study of the effects of tools supporting communication in AGSD. More precisely, this paper analyses the perception of team members about communication infrastructures in AGSD. The research question to which this study responds concerns how development teams perceive the communication infrastructure while developing products using agile methodologies. Most previous studies have dealt with communication support from a highly technological media tool perspective. In this research work, instead, observations were obtained from three perspectives: communication among team members, communication of the status of the development process, and communication of the status of the progress of the product under development. It has been possible to show that team members perceive advantages to using media tools that make them feel in practice that teams are co-located, such as smartboards supported by efficient video-tools, and combining media tools with centralized repository tools, with information from the process development and product characteristics, that allow distributed teams to effectively share information about the status of the project/process/product during the development process in order to overcome some of the still existing problems in communication in AGSD

A Global Software Inspection Process for Distributed Software Development

Globally distributed software development is an established trend towards delivering high-quality software to global users at lower costs. The main expected benefits from distributed software development are improvements in development time efficiency, being close to the customers and having flexible access to greater and less costly resources. Organizations require to use their existing resources as effectively as possible, and also need to employ resources on a global scale from different sites within the organization and from partner organization throughout the world. However, distributed software development particularly face communication and coordination problems due to spatial, temporal and cultural separation between team members. Ensuring quality issues in such projects is a significant issue. This paper presents global software inspection process in the distributed software development environment towards quality assurance and management