Process Models and Distribution of Work in Offshoring Application Software Development

Common process models for the development of application software (AS) are examined as to how well they are suited for offshoring projects. The need for communication and interaction among onsite and offshore project stakeholders is identified as a critical success factor. Process models used by organizations providing offshoring services are discussed, and a generalized offshoring life cycle model is developed. A specific focus is set on the distribution of work between the organization that outsources AS development and the offshore organization that carries out the major share of the development work. Problems and challenges that have to be faced, making offshoring a difficult task, are discussed. --

Flexible Global Software Development (GSD): Antecedents of Success in Requirements Analysis

Globalization of software development has resulted in a rapid shift away from the traditional collocated, on-site development model, to the offshoring model. Emerging trends indicate an increasing interest in offshoring even in early phases like requirements analysis. Additionally, the flexibility offered by the agile development approach makes it attractive for adaptation in globally distributed software work. A question of significance then is what impacts the success of offshoring earlier phases, like requirements analysis, in a flexible and globally distributed environment? This article incorporates the stance of control theory to posit a research model that examines antecedent factors such as requirements change, facilitation by vendor and client site-coordinators, control, and computer-mediated communication. The impact of these factors on success of requirements analysis projects in a “flexible” global setting is tested using two quasi-experiments involving students from Management Development Institute, India and Marquette University, USA. Results indicate that formal modes of control significantly influence project success during requirements analysis. Further, facilitation by both client and vendor site coordinators positively impacts requirements analysis success

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

SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators

Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users' productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit

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

Challenges When Using Scrum in Globally Distributed Teams

The interest of companies towards using agile approaches in GSD projects is growing at a rapid pace. On that note, it is extremely vital to consider the challenging factors involved in agile practices such as scrum in GSD projects. However, the remarkable and effective attempts towards precisely identify, synthesize and report the literature on agile practices for GSD projects have always been inadequate (Hossain, AliBabar & Young Paik, 2009). With the purpose of encouraging research committee to explore and analyze the projects that implements scrum process in globally distributed environment, the thesis paper places great emphasis on challenges involved with the implementation of agile methodologies with scrum framework in Global Software Development. In order to thoroughly understand these challenges, the thesis paper also addresses the core characteristics of a scrum team, benefits of scrum framework and the nature of Global Software Development projects. Moreover, through the qualitative data collection approach the mythology section of this thesis will in designing the further sections of this thesis. In accordance with the selected data collection approach, the result section focuses on the communication challenges as well as gathers the bunch of information through the interviews of two professionals working in the scrum projects with GSD settings. Going forward, the discussion section talks about the lessons learned and solutions to alleviate the challenges associated with distributed scrum projects

Agile global software development communication challenges: A systematic review

Organizations have shown a significant interest in adopting human and communication-oriented agile practices for Global Software Development (GSD). Agile practices originated in the context of small and medium co-located project teams present a number of communication challenges when they are applied to the distributed GSD. There is a need to understand the underlying communication challenges of agile GSD environment. This paper adopts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach and reports communication challenges in the agile GSD context. A customized literature search and selection criteria was first developed and then applied to initially identify a set of 449 papers. Finally, 22 of 449 papers, relevant to this research, were selected for this study. These final 22 papers were reviewed and 7 major categories of communication challenges were identified in the context of agile GSD. The review results of this paper are expected to help researchers and practitioners to understand communication challenges of agile GSD and develop tools, techniques and strategies to deal with these challenges. This paper is limited to the number of reviewed studies from selected databases