Deependra Moitra

Global software development

The last several decades have witnessed a steady, irreversible trend toward the globalization of business, and of software-intensive high-technology businesses in particular. Economic forces are relentlessly turning national markets into global markets and spawning new forms of competition and cooperation that reach across national boundaries. This change is having a profound impact not only on marketing and distribution but also on the way produces are conceived, designed, constructed, tested, and delivered to customers. The author considers how software development is increasingly a multisite, multicultural, globally distributed undertaking.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Global Software Development: How Far Have We Come?

Global software development efforts have increased in recent years, and such development seems to have become a business necessity for various reasons, including cost, availability of resources, and the need to locate development closer to customers. However, theres still much to learn about global software development before the discipline becomes mature. This special issue aims to assess the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice. It presents five articles that cover various aspects of global software development, including knowledge management strategies, distributed software development, requirements engineering, distributed requirements, and managing offshore collaboration. A Point/Counterpoint department discusses whether global software development is indeed a business necessity.This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.

Web services and flexible business processes: towards the adaptive enterprise

The full potential of the expected role of Information Technology (IT) in facilitating organizational adaptation has not yet been realized because most of the existing systems do not lend themselves to the levels of flexibility required to support changes in business processes. This problem is accentuated with increase of inter-organizational linkages involving disparate IT systems. Web services have emerged as a disruptive technology, with a real potential of enabling flexible business processes. This paper examines the influence of Web services on business process flexibility and analyses its impact on organizational adaptation.

Managing change for software process improvement initiatives: a practical experience‐based approach

This paper provides a practical experience-based approach to managing change in software process improvement initiatives. The contents presented in this paper are based on author’s experience in leading software process improvement initiatives and deploying quality processes in hi-tech organizations involved in large-scale software development, and also based on some years of research and consulting. The paper emphasizes the critical role of processes for the success of software development organizations and provides a practical insight into the process of change for achieving software excellence. Importance of a strategic and structured approach to change management is discussed. An analysis of the problems and difficulties associated with change management in software process improvement initiatives is presented. A simple and pragmatic approach for successfully managing change for software process improvement is provided. A matrix identifying the skills, attitude and characteristics essential for a successful change agent is also presented. Copyright

Evolving a pervasive IT infrastructure: a technology integration approach

Over the past five years or so, pervasive computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm with a great deal of appeal. Enterprises are increasingly showing interest in deploying pervasive information technology (IT) infrastructures to realise the perceived benefits offered by this new computing paradigm. However, a return on the investment and considerations of the currently deployed infrastructure is a constraint for businesses to invest in a pervasive IT infrastructure. Realising that the economics of an investment in a new infrastructure can affect the embracing of pervasive IT, we suggest an approach that shows how the existing technology solutions available in the market and deployed in an enterprise can be used to develop a pervasive IT infrastructure, thereby protecting investments and maximising returns. We present an evolution model to systematically and incrementally achieve a pervasive IT environment, and present guidelines for evaluating which services to develop first based on “evolving the existing infrastructure point of view.” This work provides practical implications for enterprises as well as pointers for research.

Global Innovation Exchange

OVERVIEW: As technology-based competition becomes central to the business landscape, R&D will be a major determinant of enterprise competitiveness. To stay ahead, leaders have adopted several approaches to R&D and innovation generation, including in-house R&D, R&D outsourcing, R&D partnerships and alliances, and technology-based acquisition. Now a new approach, “Global Innovation Exchange,” is emerging on the scene. GIE leverages the World Wide Web to draw upon the expertise of the global R&D community to solve specific technical and business problems. It holds significant promise and has far-reaching implications for innovation-centric businesses.

Web services, grid computing, and business process management: exploiting complementarities for business agility

Recent technologies including Web services, business process modeling tools, and grid computing, are key to facilitating business agility. Web services standardize application interfaces to ease inter-application communication, and facilitate standards based business process management. Grid computing provides a way for virtualizing heterogeneous resources to collectively yield a computationally powerful IT environment with tremendous promise in improving utilization levels of individual IT resources. By leveraging Web services, a standards based grid is being envisaged in the OGSA model. In this paper, we explore the complementarities of Web services and business process management (BPM) technologies. We also lay the foundation for using Web services based BPM in solving orchestration and workflow issues in grid computing.

Managing Organizational Change for Software Process Improvement

Software process improvement has become a necessity for software intensive businesses for their competitive performance. However, managing change and revitalizing the organization for software process improvement is a considerable challenge. This chapter presents an analysis of the factors that enable and inhibit software process improvement, and presents a model and recommendations for successfully bringing about organizational change for software process improvement.

The global software industry

This article compares the offshore market strategy of the U.S., India and China in the 21st century. In developing its offshoring strategies the U.S. is gradually moving away from low cost labor strategies of the past. It is redirecting its resources to organizations that have a focus towards leading edge technology, research and development, high-quality infrastructure and clusters that can deliver value added products and services. Meanwhile, evidence would also suggest that many large Indian companies are developing expertise in the so-called vertical domain areas because they offer a rise up the value chain into areas of work that are longer-term and more lucrative than traditional code programming. Comparing India with China, as an outsourcing destination, one of the important strengths of China is its huge domestic software market that attracts domestic software firms as well as foreign software firms. China is starting to promote social and economic development through the wider use of information technology

3 – India: a PESTEL analysis

This chapter presents a Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal (PESTEL) analysis of the Indian software industry. In the last three decades, India has gained a prominent position on the world business map due to its emergence as a leading “software nation.” The rise of the Indian software industry has been so phenomenal that it is considered a notable economic development of the last century. What began with the supply of skilled software professionals to the United States in the 1970s came to be the worlds fastest growing software industry over the next three decades, known globally for its superior software capability and leading to a new identity for India. Since its beginning in the late 1970s, the Indian software industry has grown by leaps and bounds, as testified by standard economic indicators, such as growth in sales, employment, and export volumes. The genesis of the Indian software industry can be traced to fortuitous circumstances and an evolutionary approach characterized by experimentation, its growth is certainly attributable to a deliberate strategy supported by a host of hard and soft factors, which are discussed in the chapter.