Modeling Coordination in Offshore Software Development

Controlling and minimizing coordination costs has been shown to be an important factor to reduce overall project performance in distributed software development. In this research-in-progress paper we investigate the effects of software complexity, software integration, distributed labor division policies, learning effects on software coordination costs. Drawing from data collected on 130 software construction cycles in 34 large projects of a leading offshore development firm, we first present our analysis on how coordination costs relate to team organization factors and complexity of evolving software. We base our analytic model of coordination costs in offshore software development on these empirical relationships, and give an overview of our modeling approach. We apply our model of software coordination costs to develop resource allocation policies in the projects we studied. We consider both waterfall and iterative software development methodologies and also tandem and parallel integration schemes. Our modeling approach helps managers to develop a dynamic coordination policy to aid iterative software development in distributed development environments

Communication Structures in Partially Distributed Teams: The Importance of Inclusiveness

A partially distributed team (PDT) consists of two or more subteams that are separated geographically. In a PDT, members of a given subteam are co-located, but they collaborate with members of geographically distant subteams. PDTs are commonplace across diverse IT settings, including outsourcing, off-shoring, and distributed organizations. Often the distance separating subteams spans multiple time zones that encompass diverse cultures and countries, as in the case of global software development teams. Findings are presented from a large-scale international PDT project involving IT students from 13 universities. Quantitative analysis of three emergent communication structures adopted by PDTs show significant differences in terms of both procedural (i.e., awareness and coordination) and socio-emotional (i.e., shared identity and trust) team interaction variables as well as perceptions of team performance. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis shows that inclusive leadership behaviors and the use of inclusive media and software positively impact team interaction processes and performance

E-Learning For Software Engineering: A Case Study On Teaching Information Systems Online Group Project With Extreme Programming

This paper reports the experience gained in software engineering group work within the framework of a fourteen week master’s level graduate course on information systems development. Teams of three to five members developed web-based application systems using the Distributed eXtreme Programming (XP) methodology. A case study is proposed to understand the issues encountered by students during the software development process and to determine the impact of XP methodology as well as team members’ geographical distribution on students’ overall performance. We suggest that teaching an information systems group project online with agile methodology (i.e. distributed XP) brings several issues to be considered before and during the development process. This study points out these issues, particularly those regarding student teams’ communication, coordination, and collaboration practices. Improvement of these issues in the future would help educators develop more effective education settings and help students enhance their performance

Mind Your Outcomes: The ∆QSD Paradigm for Quality-Centric Systems Development and Its Application to a Blockchain Case Study

This paper directly addresses a long-standing issue that affects the development of many complex distributed software systems: how to establish quickly, cheaply, and reliably whether they can deliver their intended performance before expending significant time, effort, and money on detailed design and implementation. We describe ΔQSD, a novel metrics-based and quality-centric paradigm that uses formalised outcome diagrams to explore the performance consequences of design decisions, as a performance blueprint of the system. The distinctive feature of outcome diagrams is that they capture the essential observational properties of the system, independent of the details of system structure and behaviour. The ΔQSD paradigm derives bounds on performance expressed as probability distributions encompassing all possible executions of the system. The ΔQSD paradigm is both effective and generic: it allows values from various sources to be combined in a rigorous way so that approximate results can be obtained quickly and subsequently refined. ΔQSD has been successfully used by a small team in Predictable Network Solutions for consultancy on large-scale applications in a number of industries, including telecommunications, avionics, and space and defence, resulting in cumulative savings worth billions of US dollars. The paper outlines the ΔQSD paradigm, describes its formal underpinnings, and illustrates its use via a topical real-world example taken from the blockchain/cryptocurrency domain. ΔQSD has supported the development of an industry-leading proof-of-stake blockchain implementation that reliably and consistently delivers blocks of up to 80 kB every 20 s on average across a globally distributed network of collaborating block-producing nodes operating on the public internet.publishedVersio