Abstract
Any global software development project needs to deal with distances – geographical, cultural, time zone, etc. – between the groups of developers engaged in the project. To successfully manage the risks caused by such distances, there is a need to explicate and present the distances in a form suitable for manual or semi-automatic analysis, the goal of which is to detect potential risks and find ways of mitigating them. The article presents a technique of modeling a global software development project suitable for such analysis. The project is modeled as a complex socio-technical system that consists of functional components connected to each other through output-input relationships. The components do not coincide with the organizational units of the project, and their teams can be distributed through the geographical and organizational landscape of the project. The modeling technique helps to explicate and represent various kinds of distances between the functional components to determine which of them constitute risk factors. The technique was developed during two case studies, of which the second is used for presenting and demonstrating the new modeling technique in the article.
Highlights
It is commonly accepted that a Global Software Development (GSD) project has a number of characteristics that makes the task of managing such a project more difficult than managing a onesite project
This difficulty is connected to the various distances between the members and teams of a GSD project, which can be of different sorts: geographical, time-zone, socio-cultural, etc
We suggest a way of modeling a GSD project aimed at potential risk detection that is based on viewing the project as a complex system
Summary
It is commonly accepted that a Global Software Development (GSD) project has a number of characteristics that makes the task of managing such a project more difficult than managing a onesite project This difficulty is connected to the various distances between the members and teams of a GSD project, which can be of different sorts: geographical, time-zone, socio-cultural, etc. As we have argued in the previous sections, identifying and mitigating risks in a software project needs to take into consideration socio-technical dependences between the functional components of the software project To explicate these dependencies to the diverse people involved in the project, e.g. management, requirements engineers, developers and testers, their visual representation could be of great help. Other tools of similar sorts are overviewed in the survey presented in [28]
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