Global Software Engineering Research Articles

Does Distance Still Matter? Revisiting Collaborative Distributed Software Design

Global software engineering requires supporting distributed collaboration for most software development activities. However, geographical distance challenges effective collaboration. Nowadays, we’re witnessing significant advances in communication and collaboration technologies. So, researchers explored whether these advances enable effective remote collaboration. To that end, they studied the design activities of both colocated and distributed professional software designers. The findings are based on analysis of video recordings of design sessions and questionnaires. The researchers found that despite comprehensive technological improvements, distance still matters. To ensure effective distributed software design, designers must consider extra (nontechnical) details. This article is part of a theme issue on collaborative modeling.

GSEPIM: A roadmap for software process assessment and improvement in the domain of global software development

AbstractSoftware development firms have begun adopting the practice of global software development (GSD). The main reason for the shift toward globalization is the various benefits received by software development firms. However, there are several issues faced by GSD organizations, particularly those associated with software process improvement (SPI). It has been noticed that a formal process improvement approach could assist in successfully executing development activities in GSD. The core objective of this research work is to develop a global software engineering process improvement model (GSEPIM) to assess and improve software process activities in a GSD environment. The proposed model will be developed based on existing models in other domains, an empirical study conducted with GSD practitioners, and an understanding of critical success factors and challenges of SPI. In this study, the first step in the development of GSEPIM is completed by identifying the challenges of SPI in GSD and presenting a solution in the form of a robust framework.

The ABC of Software Engineering Research

A variety of research methods and techniques are available to SE researchers, and while several overviews exist, there is consistency neither in the research methods covered nor in the terminology used. Furthermore, research is sometimes critically reviewed for characteristics inherent to the methods. We adopt a taxonomy from the social sciences, termed here the ABC framework for SE research, which offers a holistic view of eight archetypal research strategies. ABC refers to the research goal that strives for generalizability over Actors (A) and precise measurement of their Behavior (B), in a realistic Context (C). The ABC framework uses two dimensions widely considered to be key in research design: the level of obtrusiveness of the research and the generalizability of research findings. We discuss metaphors for each strategy and their inherent limitations and potential strengths. We illustrate these research strategies in two key SE domains, global software engineering and requirements engineering, and apply the framework on a sample of 75 articles. Finally, we discuss six ways in which the framework can advance SE research.

Agile practices for global software development vendors in the development of green and sustainable software

AbstractOver the last decade, the use of agile methods has grown dramatically for software development. Agile methods guarantee to accelerate the delivery of remarkable software with increased user satisfaction and reduced cost. However, in recent years, due to emergence of green software engineering, software developers are compelled to focus more on green and sustainable aspects of software. Global software engineering aims to design, develop, and use a software with limited energy and computing resources. Recently, software engineers in global software development (GSD) have adapted agile methods for quick, interactive, and environment‐friendly software development. However, there is a lack of specific practices to be followed by GSD vendors in the development of green and sustainable software.In this study, we have identified 36 agile practices through systematic literature review and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions; 53 relevant papers were identified and reviewed. Findings of the systematic literature review were then empirically validated through questionnaire survey in GSD industry, in which 106 relevant experts from 25 different countries participated. The identified agile practices are intended to assist GSD vendors in strengthening their agile maturity towards green and sustainable software development.

Geographical Distance and Communication Challenges in Global Software Development: A Review

Due to innumerous advantages the Global software engineering is trending now a days in software development industry. Basic drivers for this trend are flexibility, faster development and expected cost saving. Software development has moved from traditional development to the global software development (GSD). Global software development is very important and ordinary practice in the software industry. In GSD, the developers are distributed across different sites and different countries, and lots of problems arise due to the physical social and cultural barriers. Global Software development is facing a number of challenges including Geographical distance, Communication and collaboration, time, culture, trust, tasks distribution, requirements gathering and collaboration. In this paper, authors conducted a detailed study on geographical distances and communication challenges in GSD, their inter dependencies, and also the proposed solutions and guidelines to address these challenges that are very critical in the success of GSD projects. Also in this paper a detailed literature review is provided, combined results are summarized and on the basis of these studies, a comparative study is made. This research will be helpful for other researchers to draw new strategies to tackle these challenges.

Empirical evidence in follow the Sun software development: A systematic mapping study

ContextFollow the Sun (FTS) development is a special case of Global Software Development. It is applied in the context of global projects to reduce the software development life-cycle duration. A number of studies have attempted to aggregate a better understanding of FTS development, but it is still an immature research area. ObjectiveThis paper aims to investigate the existing empirical evidence about FTS research with a focus on identifying what research has been conducted in the area and which results have been obtained. MethodTo achieve this goal, we performed a systematic mapping study to answer our research questions: “Which FTS studies have been published in the literature?” and “What empirical support is provided for them?” We investigated papers published between 1990 and 2017. The synthesis was made through classifying the papers into different categories (research topics, research methods, conferences and journals venues for FTS research, and countries involved in FTS research). ResultsWe selected 57 papers using a predefined search strategy. The majority of the papers discussing FTS were published in the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE). The main research topic addressed is processes and organization development for FTS. Case studies combined with the interview as a research sub-method is adopted in the most studies performed in FTS. The majority of the existing research and the most active researchers in this topic are from the United States and Brazil. However, India and the United States are the countries that appear most often in the studies conducted to investigate FTS. ConclusionOur findings suggest that FTS software development is an up-to-date research topic in Software Engineering. However, little information about FTS has been published over the last few years. The emergent need in this research is the development of evaluation research for testing FTS feasibility and effectiveness in practice.

Socio-Cultural Challenges in Global Software Engineering Education

Global software engineering education (GSEE) is aimed at providing software engineering (SE) students with knowledge, skills, and understanding of working in globally distributed arrangements so they can be prepared for the global SE (GSE) paradigm. It is important to understand the challenges involved in GSEE for improving the quality and experience of educators and students. This paper reports the findings of an empirical study on the socio-cultural aspects of GSEE. A case study was conducted involving 14 participants from ten different universities in eight countries. The data was analyzed using grounded theory’s open coding procedure. The key contributions of this paper are the identification and description of seven dimensions of socio-cultural distance that caused several significant challenges in the courses: 1) language differences; 2) concept of time; 3) attitude toward grades; 4) assumptions about national culture; 5) differences in autonomy; 6) influence of the course lecturer; and 7) work habits. Recommendations from this paper that are expected to benefit GSEE educators and students include: cross-cultural orientation of students prior to the course; use of various strategies to support better comprehension of different English accents (e.g., speaking slowly, replaying recorded video messages, and text chatting); and educators familiarizing themselves and their students with the relevant GSE and GSEE literature.

Review and Analysis of Software Development Team Communication Research

Research problem: Communication affects many aspects of the software engineering process. In addition, poor team communication is often a root cause of failure for complex engineering projects. In global software engineering, communication and coordination become more challenging, and that fact affects the quality of the product. The goal of this study is to analyze the type and quality of research performed on software development team communication, and to present data to guide future research in these areas. Research questions: (1) How much communication research activity in the area of software development teams has been described in the literature from 2005 to 2015? (2) What is the current state of software development team communication research (what has been done and to what degree)? (3) What is the predominant research methodology of software development team communication research? (4) Where are the gaps in the current state of software development team communication research? (5) What are the major, common findings about communication in software development teams? Methodology: We reviewed 184 journal papers and performed a content analysis of the keywords from the relevant papers to create a software engineering team research taxonomy. We utilized this taxonomy to categorize the context of communication research papers. We then used the categorization results to determine the most active software development team communication research areas. In addition, we analyzed the quality of the journals (using impact factor and H-index as metrics) and the type of research performed in these areas (i.e., qualitative, quantitative, survey, social network analysis, or literature review). Results and conclusions: The results showed that the most active software development team communication research areas are global software development, project effectiveness, and effective teamwork. The most prevalent research methodology is a survey among those research areas. We conclude this paper with a presentation and discussion of the major findings of each research paper as well as the common themes among those findings in each of the top research areas.

Automated support for reuse-based requirements engineering in global software engineering

GlobalSoftware Engineering implies a paradigm shift towards globally-distributed development that can be advantageous, but at the cost of having to address the specific challenges that arise when the stakeholders are not colocated. Reusing assets during the initial processes of the software development life cycle could be beneficial, but automated support is essential if the expected benefits of requirements reuse are to be actually obtained. The main contribution of this paper is the specification of a collection of software features for a tool support for distributed, catalogue-based natural-language requirements reuse. Two additional contributions are also made: (1) an implementation of the requirements specifications previously mentioned using Drupal, a Content Management System; and (2) an empirical assessment of this tool support using distributed university students as subjects (n=57). According to our findings, the tool helps in making requirements reuse better than requirements specification from scratch and in managing traceability, is easy to use, useful, and easy to learn. In contrast, the tool is not particularly suitable for managing users and user roles.

Requirements Prioritization Techniques for Global Software Engineering

<p>Increase in globalization of the industry of software requires an exploration of requirements engineering (RE) in software development institutes at multiple locations. Requirements engineering task is very complicated when it is performed at single site, but it becomes too much complex when stakeholder groups define well-designed requirements under language, time zone and cultural limits. Requirements prioritization (RP) is considered as an imperative part of software requirements engineering in which requirements are ranked to develop best-quality software. In this research, a comparative study of the requirements prioritization techniques was done to overcome the challenges initiated by the corporal distribution of stakeholders within the organization at multiple locations. The objective of this study was to make a comparison between five techniques for prioritizing software requirements and to discuss the results for global software engineering. The selected techniques were Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Cumulative Voting (CV), Value Oriented Prioritization (VOP), Binary Search Tree (BST), and Numerical Assignment Technique (NAT). At the end of the research a framework for Global Software Engineering (GSE) was proposed to prioritize the requirements for stakeholders at distributed locations.<strong></strong></p>

Critical challenges in managing offshore software development outsourcing contract from vendors' perspectives

Offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) is a Global Software Engineering paradigm for developing high quality software at low cost in low-wage countries; where client organisation contracts out all or part of software development activities to vendor organisation. The vendor organisation provides the agreed software development work in return for remuneration. The objective of the research is to identify critical challenges faced by vendor organisations in management and execution of OSDO contract, and to analyse the identified challenges based on the variables such as time/year and organisational size. The authors have used systematic literature review for the identification of the challenges in OSDO contract. They have identified that 15 challenges faced by vendors in OSDO contract. Amongst these, nine challenges were marked as critical challenges. They have further analysed the identified challenges based on different variables such as organisational size, time and correlation analysis.Vendor organisations should concentrate on addressing the identified critical challenges such as `lack of project management', `poor monitoring system', `lack of outsourcing relationship management', `cultural and linguistic issues', `non-competitive price', `intellectual property rights (IPR) and regulatory issues', `failure to manage end-user expectation', `lack of negotiation strategies' and `unforeseen contingencies' for successful outcome of OSDO contract.

Systematic literature reviews in agile software development: A tertiary study

ContextA number of systematic literature reviews and mapping studies (SLRs) covering numerous primary research studies on various aspects of agile software development (ASD) exist. ObjectiveThe aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the SLRs on ASD research topics for software engineering researchers and practitioners. MethodWe followed the tertiary study guidelines by Kitchenham et al. to find SLRs published between late 1990s to December 2015. ResultsWe found 28 SLRs focusing on ten different ASD research areas: adoption, methods, practices, human and social aspects, CMMI, usability, global software engineering (GSE), organizational agility, embedded systems, and software product line engineering. The number of SLRs on ASD topics, similar to those on software engineering (SE) topics in general, is on the rise. A majority of the SLRs applied standardized guidelines and the quality of these SLRs on ASD topics was found to be slightly higher for journal publications than for conferences. While some individuals and institutions seem to lead this area, the spread of authors and institutions is wide. With respect to prior review recommendations, significant progress was noticed in the area of connecting agile to established domains such as usability, CMMI, and GSE; and considerable progress was observed in focusing on management-oriented approaches as Scrum and sustaining ASD in different contexts such as embedded systems. ConclusionSLRs of ASD studies are on the rise and cover a variety of ASD aspects, ranging from early adoption issues to newer applications of ASD such as in product line engineering. ASD research can benefit from further primary and secondary studies on evaluating benefits and challenges of ASD methods, agile hybrids in large-scale setups, sustainability, motivation, teamwork, and project management; as well as a fresh review of empirical studies in ASD to cover the period post 2008.

Preparing Tomorrow's Software Engineers for Work in a Global Environment

Global software engineering (GSE) is becoming common. It's thus important to educate university software engineering students in GSE. The authors discuss challenges to and recommendations for implementing such instruction.

How Best to Teach Global Software Engineering? Educators Are Divided

Pioneering educators discuss how they inject realism into global-software-engineering education.

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.

A Taxonomy to Support Team Coordination in Global Software Engineering Environment

A Taxonomy to Support Team Coordination in Global Software Engineering Environment

Global Software Engineering: An Industry Perspective

Professional software products and IT systems and services today are developed mostly by globally distributed teams, projects, and companies. This issue's column summarizes experiences and guidance from industry to facilitate knowledge and technology transfer. It's based on industry feedback from the annual IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering.

Cheap talk, cooperation, and trust in global software engineering

In our studies of global software engineering (GSE) teams, we found that informal, non-work-related conversations are positively associated with trust. Seeking to use novel analytical techniques to...

Teaching global software engineering: experiences and lessons learned

In this paper the author demonstrates how the GSE course was executed related to each level of the Bloom's taxonomy. It was observed that Bloom's taxonomy can play a vital role in order to effectively design and deliver a GSE course. Overall, the six levels of Bloom's cognitive domain were helpful in transforming students learning from the knowledge level to the evaluation level. However, it was observed that the knowledge level is not appropriate for higher calibre students because the content used in the knowledge level is often referred to as simple. The comprehension level seemed appropriate for all levels of students as they were able to produce different solutions based on their understanding of the problem domain. Many international students had problems with the application level as they were unable to apply the concepts and theories in the laboratories. For the analysis level, some students had difficulties in breaking down the bigger problem into smaller components. Students had mixed responses to the synthesis level. Students had some minor problems in the evaluation level. However, it was observed that if Bloom's taxonomy is used with other available teaching guidelines, the overall design and delivery of different courses can be improved.

A Global Software Engineering Knowledge Management Approach for Intensive Risk Mitigation

There is a necessity of formal risk management. A formal risk management procedure gives numerous profits to both the project group and the improvement association in general. Initially, it provides for them an organized component to give conceivability into dangers to project triumph. By acknowledging the potential effect of each one risk thing, we can concentrate on regulating the most intense risks first. We can convey risk evaluation with project estimation to quantify a conceivable schedule slippage if certain risks emerge into issues. Knowledge Management currently gets more considerations because of its assurance that learning from the past will generally assist software engineers make good decisions in uncertainty. This methodology helps the project supervisor creates sensible possibility supports. The point when data requirements are different than actual requirements, either as a result of wrong SRS understandings or mid-requirement changes to SRS as part of the requirement updating are occupied, excessively troublesome to use, excessively challenging to decipher, or they essentially do not introduce of service or significant data, chiefs should principally depend on experience and instinct for discriminating choice making.