Global Software Engineering Projects Research Articles

Teamwork Distribution: Local vs. Global Software Engineering Project Development Teamwork

Deliverable and course project become the preferred mean to measure learner competency and attainment of intended learning outcomes in IT-fields. Proper setup and evaluation for teamwork projects remains a key challenge for e-learning systems. This study investigates the possibility to improve the early prediction of academic software engineering project failure by treating teamwork differently according to the distribution of teamwork participants. Two configurations of teamwork distribution are considered. In the first configuration, a teamwork may include international participants, but all team participants are affiliated to the same institution, namely local teamwork. In the second configuration, a teamwork may include participants from different institutions, namely global teamwork. Software engineering projects are approached from two distinct perspectives. First, obeying the best practices during the system development life cycle (SDLC), namely, process perspective. Second, characteristics of the final deliverable deployed at each milestone of the SDLC, namely product perspective. A publicly released dataset collected by a designated e-learning environment is leveraged to validate the proposed approach. Results indicate a noticeable variance among local and global distributions. These results puts evidence that the reasons behind software engineering teamwork project failures may vary depending on the distribution of the teamwork, local vs. global. Consequently, it advise to customize e-learning systems differently according to the teamwork distribution.

TOWARDS ANALYZING QUALITATIVE DATA

Managing a software project at distributed sites which is called as Global Software Engineering (GSE) are very challenging compared to managing a project at collocated site. There are many contributing factors which makes the coordination as a big challenge in GSE because of the software project is developed across the countries and the team members are segregated all over the world (da Silva, Costa, Franca, & Prikladinicki, 2010). Therefore, projects that are developed in GSE needs more extensive coordination. Many models have been developed to overcome the coordination challenges in GSE. Despite of having numerous models in GSE, to the best of researcher’s knowledge there is no model to assess the coordination procedures in GSE projects. Thus, at the end of the research, the researchers proposed an Evaluation Model to assess the coordination procedures effectively in GSE projects. So to formulate this model, one of the research objective is to identify the coordination approaches and related indicators in GSE from the real GSE project practitioners, this is done through qualitative analysis using Nvivo.

Assessing Students’ IT Professional Values in a Global Project Setting

This research aimed at evaluating the development and use of low-cost affective domain assessment instruments, culminating with personal and group characterization of representative global information technology (IT) professional values. Values and valuing are a compelling component of Bloom's affective domain of learning for engineering education. In helping students develop professional engineering competencies, it is essential that they develop not just cognitive knowledge of something but also values related to that knowledge and the ability to express these values in professional action. However, even if some professional values are identified, understood, and expressed, assessing students’ values and valuing are difficult, and assessment instruments are often difficult to develop, particularly for assessing student learning in the context of a particular course. This exploratory study aimed at examining assessment of dispositional knowledge in the context of global software engineering (GSE). It focused on the development and use of a set of instruments for assessing affective domain student learning of global IT/software engineering (SE) professional values. The project included making explicit the IT professional values of interest among the participating faculty in the form of actionable value statements. Following a process derived from Thurstone scale development, the project included validation of these statements with an expert panel as question roots, followed by the use of these questions to investigate student and alumni receiving, responding, and valuing of these professional values. The effort needed to generate questionnaires suitable for course use was relatively low; these questionnaires were deployed to students and alumni from an open-ended global software engineering project course. Students responding reported significant agreement when receiving these global values, but sent more mixed responses in responding to and valuing them. The effort helped identify several actionable IT professional values worth reinforcing in future course offerings.

An extended global software engineering taxonomy

In Global Software Engineering (GSE), the need for a common terminology and knowledge classification has been identified to facilitate the sharing and combination of knowledge by GSE researchers and practitioners. A GSE taxonomy was recently proposed to address such a need, focusing on a core set of dimensions; however its dimensions do not represent an exhaustive list of relevant GSE factors. Therefore, this study extends the existing taxonomy, incorporating new GSE dimensions that were identified by means of two empirical studies conducted recently. To address the research questions of this study, we used evidence found through a systematic literature review and a survey. Based on literature, new dimensions were added to the existing taxonomy. We identified seven dimensions to extend and incorporate into the recently proposed GSE taxonomy. The resulting extended taxonomy was later on validated by comparing it with the existing taxonomy on which the extension is built and one additional taxonomy. We also demonstrated the utility of the extended taxonomy using it to classify eight finished real GSE projects. The extended taxonomy was representative enough to classify the projects in a clear way. The extended taxonomy can help both researchers and practitioners by providing dimensions that can enable the description of different GSE contexts in a more comprehensive way; this can facilitate the understanding, comparison and aggregation of GSE-related findings.

Cloud Data Security for Goal Driven Global Software Engineering Projects

We focus over the requirement for global requirements engineering methodology for assisting activities and clients to choose cloud benefits and reducing risks. A methodology is needed to consider for requirements engineering. We defend that Goal-Driven Requirements Engineering (GDRE) is acknowledging benchmark to choose for goals that are common as well as adaptable affirmations of users’ mandates, which could be improved and moderated for risks. We also explain the steps of the expected approach as well as we demonstrate the application of the methodology through a prototype. The methodology can be applied by any cloud infrastructure organizations with global software awareness.

Using agents to manage Socio-Technical Congruence in a Global Software Engineering project

In Global Software Engineering (GSE) there are a number of communication and coordination challenges which are brought about by the factor of distance. Measuring Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) is, however, presented as a suitable technique for helping to resolve those issues. This leads us to believe that applying STC measurements to GSE might be beneficial, improving communication and coordination. However, after studying existing tools that use STC measurements, we detected some gaps, both in the way they measure STC and in the features offered by the tools for the GSE environment. That is why we have designed an Agent Architecture for coordination and communication that aims to fill the gaps found in the current tools and includes features adapted to GSE characteristics. This is achieved by taking advantage of the special features that agents offer. Moreover, this proposal has been validated in a case study performed at Indra Software Labs, a global software development company. Results show that, by using our proposal, it is possible to improve coordination and communication in a distributed environment.

Group Awareness in Global Software Engineering

Insufficient team collaboration often challenges global software engineering projects. Group awareness can improve teams' trust, relationships, and efficiency. This article surveys the key technologies and tools that support group awareness and collaboration. The insights on technologies derive from discussions and presentations at related conferences, including the IEEE-sponsored International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE).

Data collection in global software engineering research: learning from past experience

Global Software Engineering has become a standard in today's software industry. Research in distributed software development poses severe challenges that are due to the spatial and temporal distribution of the actors, as well as to language, intercultural and organizational aspects. These challenges occur in addition to "traditional" challenges of the domain itself in large-scale software projects, like coordination and communication issues, requirements volatily, lack of domain knowledge, among others. While several authors have reported empirical studies of global software development projects, the methodological difficulties and challenges of this type of studies have not been sufficiently discussed. In this paper, we share our experiences of collecting and analysing qualitative data in the context of Global Software Engineering projects. We discuss strategies for gaining access to field sites, building trust and documenting distributed and complex work practices in the context of several research projects we have conducted in the past 9 years. The experiences described in this paper illustrate the need to deal with fundamental problems, such as understanding local languages and different cultures, observing synchronous interaction, or dealing with barriers imposed by political conflicts between the sites. Based on our findings, we discuss some practical implications and strategies that can be used by other researchers and provide some recommendations for future research in methodological aspects of Global Software Engineering.

An empirical study of learning by osmosis in global software engineering

SUMMARYTo teach global software engineering, we devised a complementary distributed module with a shared project involving both local and international teams. In local teams, students are located at the same university and trained in one of the two complementary topics. In international teams, students are located at two different universities and trained in one of the two complementary topics. This study empirically investigates whether the students in the international teams can compensate the extra effort required to deal with communication, coordination, and collaboration issues that characterize global software engineering projects with learning by osmosis (i.e., by transferring knowledge among globally distributed teams trained on different topics). The results show that there was no statistically significant difference between the performance of local and international teams. We assert that the students in the international and local teams perform equally well, thanks to learning by osmosis. However, our analysis of the self‐reported questionnaire data revealed that most of the participants (i.e., 70%) would like to work in local teams in real‐life project, 74% of the participants thought international teams were less efficient, and 41% of the participants reported lack of trust in their international team members compared with their local team members. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fear and distrust in global software engineering projects

SUMMARYWhen global software engineering (GSE) is understood as knowledge intensive collaborative work, many of the reasons for the problems encountered in GSE projects can be traced back to the social conditions framing the collaboration between people at different physical sites. A total of 59 interviews were conducted in eight GSE projects of two large software companies with sites in Finland and other countries. As a result of categorization of problems related to group relations, the lack of trust between the main site and the other sites, and the fear of negative personal consequences among the project employees at the main site due to introduction of GSE were found to be the major problems in the projects. Our analysis suggests that poorly communicated reasoning for GSE can lay the ground for fear and for distrust between employees at remote sites. Unfulfilled cognitive expectations and fear related to one's professional future were found to be the sources of distrust toward employees at off‐site locations. The main contribution of this study is a novel empirical description of the linkages between fear and distrust in GSE. In addition, practical implications to effectively implement an organizational change from collocated development to distributed development are suggested. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.