Distributed Software Development Environment Research Articles

Developing a knowledge-based perspective of coordination in global software development

Purpose This study aims to develop a model for coordination and communication overhead in distributed software development through case study analysis in the Indian outsourcing software industry. The model is based on business knowledge, which can be classified as domain, regulatory, strategic, business process and operation process knowledge as per existing literature. Design/methodology/approach Double case study method was used to verify an existing knowledge–management framework of software development from the literature. The stakeholders of both the cases were interviewed, and project documents were verified to reach conclusions. Findings The findings supported the business knowledge classification from the literature. The concept can be used to analyze the software project in a distributed environment. Research limitations/implications The research work findings are based only on two case studies. The study findings cannot be generalized and should be used as a learning tool. There can be large variations of project characteristics with differences in business knowledge requirements. The research shows the importance of business knowledge transfer in global software development. Practical implications Projects managers in the distributed software development environment can use the findings in project planning and work allocation for better control over cost and schedule, etc. Originality/value There is little research works attempted to study the business knowledge classification in the global software industry making the research novel.

A Decentralized Framework for Managing Task Allocation in Distributed Software Engineering

In distributed software development, planning and managing fair and transparent task allocation is both critical and challenging. The objective of this paper is to propose a decentralized blockchain-oriented, transparent task allocation framework to improve the quality of the task allocation process. It addresses the concerns of (i) enhancing collaboration, (ii) inhibiting knowledge vaporization, and (iii) reducing documentation problems. The proposed method is a novel two-fold process: First, it identifies and categorizes tasks exhibiting different dependencies and complexities to create equal task clusters based on their dependency type, difficulty, cost, and time. Second, it uses a blockchain-oriented framework to broadcast, check bid validity, allow developers to bid on tasks matching their roles and expertise, evaluate, and announce the winner for task allocation using smart contracts. Results of experimentation, surveys, and interviews with software practitioners conclude that the proposed solution is transparent and effective in allocating tasks (with Cranach’s alpha of 0.894) at a low cost of contract execution in a distributed software development environment. Overall, the proposed approach will have a positive and significant impact in industrial settings.

Towards an effective approach for architectural knowledge management considering global software development

Architectural design is expected to provide virtuous outcomes of quality software products by satisfying customer requirements. A foremost apprehension of the customer is to have a better quality product within a minimal time span. The evaporation of architectural knowledge causes snags for the quality of a system being developed. The research study aims to propose and validate a framework bridging the gaps in architectural knowledge management. A mixed research approach has been employed. In order to align closely with industry practices, action research has been considered as research methodology, while the evaluation has been performed using a multiple case study approach. The results show that the framework enables the architects to cope with complex designs in distributed software development environments. The developed tool enabled to shift the theory into practice by assisting in creation of system architecture, knowledge survival and support architectural evolution with changing requirements.

Prioritizing challenges of agile process in distributed software development environment using analytic hierarchy process

AbstractSoftware organizations are increasingly combining agile methodologies and distributed software development (DSD) for efficiently and effectively built software products. There are numerous challenges associated with scaling agile methods in a distributed environment. Our study is intended to explore and prioritize the challenges for scaling agile practices in the DSD environment. This study was divided into 3 stages. In the first stage, 22 challenges were identified from literature review and grouped into 4 categories: management, team, technology, and process based on discussion with experts. In the second stage, an online questionnaire study was conducted to validate the identified challenges. Finally, analytic hierarchy process method was used to prioritize challenges and their categories based on their relative importance. The results highlighted that management is a most significant category as compared with the other categories. Similarly, lack of management commitments, lack of effective communication, lack of knowledge sharing, etc are identified as the most significant challenges that need to be focused by the organizations for scaling agile methodologies. On the basis of the research findings, we could conclude that the identified challenges along with their categories provide a robust framework to scale agile methodologies in the DSD environment.

Effects of Using Requirements Catalogs on Effectiveness and Productivity of Requirements Specification in a Software Project Management Course

This paper presents the results of two educational experiments carried out to determine whether the process of specifying requirements (catalog-based reuse as opposed to conventional specification) has an impact on effectiveness and productivity in co-located and distributed software development environments. The participants in the experiments were 76 students enrolled in three courses on project management for software development at the University of Murcia, Spain, and the Mohammed V University of Rabat, Morocco. The results of a fixed effects meta-analysis (Hedges’ g) obtained a medium effect ( $-$ 0.495, $p=0.034$ ) for productivity, and a large effect ( $-$ 1.077, $p ) for effectiveness, in favor of using a catalog-based reuse process rather than a conventional specification process. The other co-factor examined, distribution (either global or co-located), had no statistically significant interaction with the process used (catalog-based reuse or conventional specification) for either effectiveness or productivity. Further research is required to study the effectiveness and productivity of the catalog-based requirements engineering learning method so that it can be taught in software engineering courses and applied in real software engineering projects.

The effect of onsite-offshore work division on project cost, schedule, and quality for re-engineering projects in Indian outsourcing software industry

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to make an attempt to find good values of onsite–offshore team strength; number of hours of communication between business users and onsite team and between onsite and offshore team to reduce cost and improve schedule for re-engineering projects in global software development environment. Design/methodology/approach – The system dynamics technique is used for simulation model construction and policy run experimentation. The experts from Indian software outsourcing industry were consulted for model construction, validation and analysis of policy run results in both co-located and distributed software development environment. Findings – The study results show that there is a drop in the overall team productivity in outsourcing environment by considering the offshore options. But the project cost can be reduced by employing the offshore team for coding and testing work only with minimal training for imparting business knowledge. The research results show that there is a potential to save project cost by being flexible in project schedule. Research limitations/implications – The study found that there could be substantial cost saving for re-engineering projects with a loss of project schedule when an appropriate onsite–offshore combination is used. The quality and productivity drop, however, were rather small for such combinations. The cost savings are high when re-engineering work is sent to offshore location entirely after completion of requirement analysis work at onsite location and providing training to offshore team in business knowledge The research findings show that there is potential to make large cost savings by being flexible in project schedule for re-engineering projects. Practical implications – The software project manager can use the model results to divide the software team between onsite and offshore location during various phases of software development in distributed environment. Originality/value – The study is novel as there is little attempt at finding the team distribution between onsite and offshore location in global software development environment.

A Preventive Risk Analysis for Managing Distributed Software Projects based on Deliverable

In a distributed software development environment, software projects are geographically distributed with minimal face-toface interaction between team members. Recent software functions are delegated to popular open source software projects: -examples like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chromium, Android and the Apache OpenOffice Suite, etc. So the managers must know how to perform distributed projects and its team. Most of software risk management is done throughout the whole project from inception to commissioning. The aim of this study is to understand the need for the risk assessment and management based on deliverable for both agile and traditional methods of software development process. In this study, the authors propose a model, where the protective risk analysis can be done based on the deliverables, so that require mitigations can be provided. Mitigation factors can be also based on the seriousness of the deliverable

Test strategies in distributed software development environments

Distributed software development has resulted in formation of business partners spread across different economic, temporal, and organizational zones collaborating together for shared authorship of evolving software artifacts. However, the distributed approach is not without risks, and organizations implement specific test strategies to assist in the verification process of work-in-progress software artifacts. This paper discusses the test strategies adopted in the software development lifecycle by a service provider pursuing distributed software development in New Zealand, Australia, and India. Verification and validation processes have been deployed to ascertain the quality, security and traceability of artifacts developed in distributed sites. Findings reveal that strategies are based on protection of sensitive data through management of test database, use of drivers and interfacing stub supports between modules, as well as compliance verification on incremental releases through a customized “Synchronize and Stabilize” lifecycle model. A staging environment, within the case business context, is used for evaluating the robustness of the software product before its official launch in production environment. The actual ongoing work practices within distributed software business environments are presented, which provide value to academia, industry, ICT sector and government institutions.

UMA ARQUITETURA DE DATA WAREHOUSE PARA APOIO À GESTÃO DE PROJETOS EM DESENVOLVIMENTO DISTRIBUÍDO DE SOFTWARE

Project management involves decision making, which should be based on solid, complete and consistent data. The complexity of management may increase when this involves software development in a distributed manner. This paper presents a data warehouse architecture to support the management of projects in distributed software development environments and describes the application of such architecture in a data warehouse for DiSEN, a distributed software development environment.

Selective availability: coordinating interaction initiation in distributed software development

The software industry is facing a recent trend called distributed software development (DSD), in which distributed teams require continuous support in their communication and coordination. However, there is a lack of communication tools that actually support the coordination of DSD activities. Current communication mechanisms appear to favour the issuer of an interaction, because the context of the receiver is not always considered. In this study, the authors introduce selective availability (SA), a mechanism with which to provide information about the current activities of the members in a distributed team, in order to motivate a more suitable means to initiate interactions, thus facilitating the communication and coordination of DSD activities. Moreover, the authors describe the CWS-IM tool, an extended instant messaging application that supports SA, by notifying collaborators about each of their colleague's activities. Therefore, issuers can decide whether the time is right to start the interaction. The results of an evaluation of the actual use of the tool in a DSD software development company are also presented. These results indicate that developers perceive CWS-IM to be more useful and easier to use than other traditional instant messaging applications when initiating collaboration in DSD environments.

Study the impact of Requirements management Characteristics in global software development projects: An Ontology based approach

Requirements Management is one of the challenging and key tasks in the development of software products in distributed software development environment. One of the key reasons found in our literature survey the failure of software projects due to poor project management and requirement management activity. This main aim of this paper 1. Formulate a framework for the successful and efficient requirements management framework for Global Software Development Projects. (GSD) 2. Design a Mixed organization structure of both traditional approaches and agile approaches, of global software development projects. 3. Apply Ontology based Knowledge Management Systems for both the approaches to achieve requirements issues such as missing, inconsistency of requirements, communication and knowledge management issues and improve the project management activities in a global software development environment. 4. Propose requirements management metrics to measure and manage software process during the development of information systems. The major contribution of this paper is to analyze the requirements management issues and challenges associated with global software development projects. Two hypotheses have been formulated and tested this problem through statistical techniques like correlation and regression analysis and validate the same.

OntoDiSENv1: an Ontology to Support Global Software Development


 
 
 Global Software Development (GSD) brought competitive advantages to organizations, but it has also imposed some drawbacks due to the physical distribution. A critical aspect of this approach is related to communication. In order to provide the same semantic understanding about information exchanged on the environment to all team members it is necessary to minimize the ambiguity. This paper presents OntoDiSENv1, application ontology for a distributed software development environment. The goal of this ontology is support communication among geographically dispersed team members. The ontology is integrated to a contextual information dissemination model, which notifies the team members about the actions that occur on the shared workspace and can influence their work. The main contribution of OntoDiSENv1 is to support contextual information representation and processing, providing inference capability and semantic consistency of the information disseminated.
 
 

Team Software Process in GSD Teams

Distributed software development is becoming the norm for the software industry today as an organizational response to globalization and outsourcing tendencies. In this new environment, centralized models for software development team building models have to be reanalyzed. Team Software Process (TSP) guides engineering teams in developing software-intensive products and is intended to improve the levels of quality and productivity of a team’s software development project. In this paper, the authors assess the difficulty of using TSP in distributed software development environments. The objective of this assessment is twofold; firstly, know the general difficulty for using TSP in these environments, and secondly, know the caveats to be addressed in future software development team building models designed specifically for distributed environments.

Introduction to the Special Issue—Flexible and Distributed Information Systems Development: State of the Art and Research Challenges

Process flexibility and globally distributed develop-ment are two major current trends in software andinformation systems development (ISD). The questfor flexibility is very much evident in the recent devel-opment and increasing acceptance of various agilemethods, such as eXtreme Programming (Beck andAndres 2005) and Scrum (Schwaber and Beedle 2002).Agile development methods are examples of appar-ently major success stories that seem to have runcounter to the prevailing wisdom in information sys-tems (IS) and software engineering. However, ratherthan being antimethod, agile approaches operate onthe principle of “just enough method.” The quest forflexibility is also apparent in the currently increasinginterest in striking a balance between the rigor of tra-ditional approaches and the need for adaptation ofthose approaches to suit particular development situ-ations. Although suitable methods may exist, devel-opers struggle in practice when selecting methodsand tailoring them to suit their needs. Certainly,agile methods are not exempt from this problem asthey too need to be flexibly tailored to the devel-opment context at hand (Fitzgerald et al. 2006a).Distributed development recognizes that, more andmore, ISD takes place in globally distributed settings.This is perhaps most evident in the many cases ofoffshoring and outsourcing of software developmentto low-cost countries (King and Torkzadeh 2008). Dis-tributed development places new demands on thedevelopment process through the increased complex-ity related to communication, coordination, cooper-ation, control, and culture, as well as to technologyand tools. Interestingly, many of the difficulties facedin globally distributed ISD are the same issues sur-faced by agile methods and development flexibility ingeneral.It is something of an irony that the special issuebefore us appears on the bicentenary of Darwin’sbirth. Evolutionary theory suggests that success andsurvival are not the preserve of the strongest nor themost intelligent. Rather, the ability to adapt to chang-ing circumstances is the key trait. Flexibility, one ofthe twin primary points of focus for this special issue,addresses this trait directly. A further parallel is thatDarwin’s theory of evolution was best exemplified bydifferences across different spatial locations. This isalso inherent in the second focal point for the specialissue dual focus—distributed development.

Lessons Learned from Distributed Agile Software Projects: A Case-Based Analysis

Agile software development in a distributed setting is challenging. The teams involved in the process face difficulties in communication, personnel selection, work culture, and knowledge management. The shortcomings associated with working in different time zones and the inabilities to develop trusting relationships between developers are well known. Companies often take recourse to agile software development methods in a distributed environment in search of reduced cost, higher efficiency, increased flexibility, and good customization. However, it is not clear whether agile methods can be successfully followed and their benefits realized in a distributed setting. This paper revisits and synthesizes the lessons learnt from twelve case studies detailing successful implementation of distributed agile software projects. The cases are analyzed from the perspective of the agile manifesto to determine how closely they follow its values and principles and to what extent they realize the benefits of the agile methodology. The cases lead to the discovery of disparate and innovative solutions adopted by different companies for overcoming the challenges of distributed agile software development. Some solutions are commonplace and others are unique and their combination in the context of the challenges is enlightening. The list of solutions can suitably guide companies that plan to adopt the agile methodology in distributed software development environments in future.

A reliability assessment tool for distributed software development environment based on Java and J/Link

In this paper, we propose a software reliability assessment tool based on software reliability growth models for distributed development environment by using Java programming language and J/Link technology in Mathematica. Java is an object-oriented and platform-free programming language which has several advantages such as modularization and reusability of the existing code. Especially J/Link can use and control the Mathematica kernel from a Java program. By using this J/Link technology, we can reduce some efforts to develop the tool because of reusing the existing Mathematica code used for the research. Our tool proposed here is useful for software developers in terms of the management of the system-testing process in distributed development environment.

Ontology-based multi-site software development methodology and tools

The disadvantages associated with remote communication rather than face-to-face communication is a key problem in the multi-site distributed software development environment. Awareness of what work has been done, what task has been misunderstood, what problems have been raised, what issues have been clarified, and understanding of why a team or a software engineer does not follow the project plan, and how to carry out a discussion over a multi-site distributed environment and to make a just-in-time decision are the challenge. Different teams might not be aware of what tasks are being carried out by others, potentially leading to problems such as two groups overlapping in some work or other work not being performed due to misinterpretation of the task. Wrong tasks may be carried out due to ignorance of who to contact to get the proper details. If everyone working on a certain project is located in the same area, then situational awareness is relatively straightforward but the overheads in communications to get together to discuss the problems, to raise issues, to make decisions and to find answers in a multi-site distributed environment can become very large. Consequently, these problems cause project delay and anxiety among teams and managers. Ontologies coupled with a multi-agents system allow greater ease of communication by aggregating the agreed knowledge about the project, the domain knowledge, the concepts of software engineering into a shared information resource platform and allow them to be shared among the distributed teams across the sites and enable the intelligent agents to use the ontology to carry out initial communication and classification with developers when the problem is raised in the first instance. In this paper, we present the key challenges in multi-site software engineering and the ontology representation of commonly shared conceptualisations in software development. We demonstrate the agent communication with developers in the form of man-machine interactions and the great potential of such a system to be used in the future for software engineering in multi-site environments.

Lessons learned by participants of distributed software development

AbstractThe maturation of the technical infrastructure has enabled the emergence and growth of distributed software development. This has created tempting opportunities for companies to distribute their software development, for example, to economically favourable countries so as to gain needed expertise or to get closer to customers. Nonetheless, such distribution potentially creates problems that need to be understood and addressed in order to make possible the gains offered. To clarify and understand the most difficult problems and their nature, a survey of individuals engaged in distributed software development was conducted. The purpose of this survey was to gather and share lessons learned in order to better understand the nature of the software development process when operating in a distributed software development environment and the problems that may be associated with such distributed processes. Through a clear appreciation of the risks associated with distributed development it becomes possible to develop approaches for the mitigation of these risks. This paper presents the results of the survey, focusing on the most serious problems raised by the respondents. Some practical guidelines that have been developed by industry to overcome these problems are also briefly summarized. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modeling distributed software defect removal effectiveness in the presence of code churn

Two types of discrete defect removal models that consider the dynamics of code churn behavior during software testing phases under distributed software development environment are proposed. The first model is based on a sequential debugging process, while the second model is based on an iterative debugging process during each testing phase. The mathematical relationship between the number of defects detected during a testing phase and the total estimated remaining defects at the end of the same testing phase for both models are elaborated in detail. The defect detection ratio is identified to have the greatest contribution to the variance of the estimated number of remaining defects based on the sensitivity analysis using Monte-Carlo simulation. Using the proposed models, we quantitatively show how to estimate the number of defects by varying the defect detection ratio, defect correction ratio, the percentage of added code, and the percentage of deleted code.

Project Management Model: Proposal for Performance in a Physically Distributed Software Development Environment

:The objective of this study is to propose a project management model that includes the Unified Process and UML language, for e-business software development in a physically distributed environment. The research is a qualitative study, aiming to develop new methods and models. The main research method is the case study. The proposed model includes the spiral lifecycle type, the development process of object-oriented systems and the incorporation of the procedural approach proposed by the PMBOK® Guide, expanding the management areas. The model is divided into six phases: requirement definition, project exploration and definition, production processes, evaluation, transition, and integration. In the future, the intention is to develop a support software for the model and apply this software into the environment in study.