Role of Agile Methods in Global Software Development

Currently software companies are developing the software applications that are developed by global software development teams. In order to develop the quality and cost effective software applications, companies are trying to adopt new methodologies for the global software development. Using of agile in global software development industry yielded benefits and challenges too. The researchers show that agile has many benefits in the software development and fewer complications. But suggesting the agile software development to the global projects is more challenging. This paper focuses on presenting the benefits and challenges in adopting the agile in global software development projects

Applying Agile Lean to Global Software Development

Although challenges of Global Software Development (GSD) are well known in the industry, practitioners and the organizations look for ways to improve results and overcome challenges. Companies have tried to implement many workable solutions possible to solve issues like poor communication, lack of trust, low morale and many other such issues prevalent in the distributed setting. With the success of agile, the methodology gained interest in leveraging its benefits to alleviate some of these challenges. Similarly, lean was also implemented in distributed software development to resolve issues. While each methodology provided some improvement in the results achieved in global software development, many issues persisted and the desired growth/results were not received. Recent years have seen an increased interest of applying a combination of agile and lean software development paradigms to resolve current industry issues in the area and meet the needs of rapid changing environment. This study aims to study the current practices of the combination of agile lean existing in the industry and how it can be utilized in the global software development. The study focuses on challenges faced to implement agile lean and successful sustainable implementation of agile lean in an environment of global software development

Global Software Development Project

Global software development has become a common reality with the advent of off-shore development and the need to be close to markets. This type of development has posed some challenges faced by software development personals. In this research, we report a software development project that involves the collaboration of students from USA and China

Organization Global Software Development Challenges of Software Product Quality

Leaders of global software development (GSD) processes in organizations have been confronting low software product quality. Managers of these processes have faced challenges that have been affecting customer satisfaction and that have resulted in negative social impacts on public safety, business financial performance, and global economic stability. The purpose of this qualitative exploratory multiple case study was to discover a common understanding shared by managers in Canadian GSD organizations of how to meet software product quality goals and enhance customer satisfaction. The conceptual framework for the study was based on Deming\u27s 14 principles of quality management. The purposeful sample included 30 knowledgeable participants who worked in Canada as GSD managers. Semistructured interviews conducted through telephone and audioconference tools, along with the review of related documents, were used to gather data. Eight themes emerged from the data analysis: developing a clear purpose and work principles, improving processes and employee skills, developing adequate personnel management strategies, promoting autonomy and personal worker development, formulating life cycle and development techniques, identifying challenges, formulating solutions, and focusing on product quality. The research findings have implications for positively influencing social change through the provision of methods and process knowledge to GSD organizational leaders. This information consists of best management and industry practices that can be applied to achieve software product quality and customer satisfaction, create management systems, maintain a competitive advantage, and prevent global software development project failures

Investigating an ‘Agile-Rigid’ Approach in Globally Distributed Requirements Analysis

The global software development environment brings with itself abundant business opportunities as well as challenges in terms of coordination, communication and control. Recent years have also witnessed the growth of the agile movement. To address the global software development challenges there is a need to combine the flexibility offered by the growing agile development approaches with the rigidity offered by the traditional plan-based approaches. This paper reports an exploratory quasi-experimental study, which investigates the performance of requirements analysis projects in an ‘agile-rigid’ distributed environment. The study yields several interesting conclusions that can assist organizations in managing their global software projects more effectively. Our experiment indicates that project monitoring and control, project communication, and process facilitation between peer teams significantly influence the success of such projects. Creation of an agile-rigid environment can help organizations mitigate various risks inherent in globally distributed software development

The Context of Global Software Development: Challenges, Best Practices and Benefits

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

Quality Issues in Global Software Development

The most advantageous features of Global Software Development (GSD) are its cost saving benefits and the easily availability of resources. Also the technological advancement especially in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) makes GSD a common practice in software industry. But GSD is also facing a lot of challenges. Maintaining quality in software development processes and products in GSD environments is one of the major challenges. This paper presents a survey on the challenges and factors which impact on the quality of the\ud products in GSD environments. This report identifies that most of the factors which affect the quality of software product appear as part of two major challenges: requirements and coordination. We further demonstrate that how these two challenges are affected by several factors. Finally, we present the possible solution to reduce the complexity of those various factors

Use of replication technology in a global software development environment

In this article, we have proposed a new global software development support system. Until now, the technological challenges in global software development support have been addressed on a semi-automatic ad hoc basis by Groupware technologies such aS electronic mail, teleconferencing, electronic meetings, calendaring and scheduling, and workflow. These methods are usefid but do not address the issues of site autonomy, and transactional consistency. Our proposed software development support system is based on replication technology. In our system, each software development center has the ability to make additions and modifications. Further, the system also maintains transactional consistency so all sites have the identical copy of documents in near real-time

Mobile object location discovery in unpredictable environments

Emerging mobile and ubiquitous computing environments present hard challenges to software engineering. The use of mobile code has been suggested as a natural fit for simplifing software development for these environments. However, the task of discovering mobile code location becomes a problem in unpredictable environments when using existing strategies, designed with fixed and relatively stable networks in mind. This paper introduces AMOS, a mobile code platform augmented with a structured overlay network. We demonstrate how the location discovery strategy of AMOS has better reliability and scalability properties than existing approaches, with minimal communication overhead. Finally, we demonstrate how AMOS can provide autonomous distribution of effort fairly throughout a network using probabilistic methods that requires no global knowledge of host capabilities