Next Generation Technology for Global Software Development
The software development paradigm is changing with the rise of geographically distributed, global software development (GSD). Increasingly, organizations shift all or part of their software development offshore. Several studies show that compared to co‐located projects, GSD projects are more likely to be unsuccessful due to geographical, temporal, and cultural distances, which hampers close collaboration. This project aims at providing knowledge and tools for organizations to excel in software development on a global scale. The two core contributions of this project are (i) to view cultural diversity as an opportunity for increased innovation, and (ii) to build technologies that help practitioners to move from an outsourcing model to a collaborative model of GSD.
The project consists of a strong interdisciplinary and international consortium of industrial and academic partners with substantial GSD experience – both from an industrial and a scientific point of view. Together, we aim to;
- understand the collaborative and distributed nature of GSD with a special emphasis on cultural discontinuities and opportunities
- design and evaluate a new paradigm for a collaborative infrastructure and tools for GSD
- improve GSD processes, practices, norms, and practical guidelines
- pilot trial the new technologies and practices in an industrial setting
Research objective and goals
The overall aim of this project is to understand and improve GSD practices and technologies both on a practical/industrial level as well as on a scientific level. On both levels, the objective is to
- understand challenges and opportunities in temporal, geographical, and cultural differences and develop new ways of conceptualizing and coping with cultural differences when managing complex GSD projects
- design and empirically evaluate next generation GSD technologies that view GSD as collaboration rather than as outsourcing, and help software developers and end‐users maintain a global awareness and a commitment to bridge across distances in software development
- develop and empirically evaluate a framework of GSD processes, practices, norms, and guidelines appropriate for GSD projects
For the industrial partners, the objective is to improve their GSD processes and tools. Competences, tools, methods and experience with GSD are already a key competitive parameter and this will only grow in the coming years. For the academic partners the main objective is to disseminate the findings to larger communities of practitioners and researchers.
Research activities
The research activities forms ethnographic studies of GSD, design activities of technologies for GSD, and development of frameworks for GSD processes, practices, and norms.
Relation to global interaction
The object of study Global software development is fundamentally a global interaction activity. Moreover, the research team behind the project is globally distributed.