Version Control in Distributed Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Along the last decade, many companies started using Distributed Software Development (DSD). The distribution of the software development teams over the globe has become almost a rule in large companies. However, in this context, new problems arise, which mainly involve the physical and temporal distance among the participants. Some studies show that deploying a version control system to alleviate this problem is a big challenge for distributed teams. This paper presents a systematic mapping study about works about version control that focus on DSD. We found 29 studies related to DSD version control, published between 2002 and 2012. Using the systematically extracted data from these works, we present challenges, tools, and other solutions proposed to version control in DSD. These results can support practitioners and researchers to better understand and overcome the challenges related do DSD version control, and devise more effective solutions to improve version control in a distributed setting.