Developing Green and Sustainable Software using Agile Methods in Global Software Development: Risk Factors for Vendors

Abstract

Global software development (GSD) is gaining momentum due to the potential benefits it offers. GSD aims at delivering remarkable software through a widely distributed pool of experts, with reduced efforts, minimum cost and time. In recent years, GSD developers have reshaped the development processes and have adopted agile techniques and green engineering principles to cope with the frequent changes in requirements, accelerate the development in short increments and to produce energy efficient and sustainable software. However, the adoption of agile methods for developing sustainable software possesses a number of challenges. This paper presents a list of potential challenges/risks identified through systematic literature review (SLR) that need to be avoided by the GSD vendors using agile methods for the development of green and sustainable software. Our findings reveal eight risk factors that are faced by GSD vendors in the development of green and sustainable software using agile methods. GSD vendors are encouraged to address properly all the identified factors in general and the most-frequently cited critical risks in particular, such as in-sufficient system documentation, limited support for real-time systems and large systems, management overhead, lack of customer’s presence, lack of formal communication and lack of long term planning.