Rafael Prikladnicki

Global software development in practice lessons learned

More than a decade ago, organizations seeking lower costs and access to skilled resources began to experiment with remotely located software development facilities. This change is having a profound impact not only on marketing and distribution but also on the way products are conceived, designed, constructed, tested, and delivered to customers. The number of organizations distributing their software development processes worldwide keeps increasing. As a result, software development is becoming a multi-site, multicultural and globally distributed undertaking. More recently, attention has turned toward trying to understand the factors that enable multinationals and virtual corporations to operate successfully across geographic and cultural boundaries. On the basis of these factors, we present the lessons learned from case studies in two software development units from multinational organizations located in Brazil. Copyright

Collaboration Tools for Global Software Engineering

Software engineering involves people collaborating to develop better software. Collaboration is challenging, especially across time zones and without face-to-face meetings. We therefore use collaboration tools all along the product life cycle to let us work together, stay together, and achieve results together. This article summarizes experiences and trends chosen from recent IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (IGSCE) conferences.

Distributed Software Development: Practices and challenges in different business strategies of offshoring and onshoring

Distributed Software Development involves a number of different business models, and companies intending to embark on the journey of distributed development have difficulty choosing the model(s) that suits their process and current software practice. More literature that presents similarities as well as differences among these models, in terms of processes, practices and challenges that characterize them, is thus becoming critical to software practitioners. This paper intends to bring more knowledge in this direction. We present empirical evidence from a case study of DSD practice in five companies that had projects following one or more of the different DSD business models described in the literature. We discuss the similarities and differences in the challenges faced by the projects in these models, as well as the relationship between the models, development process, and project size and complexity, as reported in the projects studied.

An empirically based terminology and taxonomy for global software engineering

Many organizations nowadays strive for utilization of benefits offered by global software engineering (GSE) and sourcing strategies are thus discussed more often. Since there are so many variations of the attributes associated with global software projects a large amount of new terms has been introduced. The diversity in sourcing jargon however has caused difficulties in determining which term to use in which situation, and thus causing further obstacles to searching and finding relevant research during e.g. systematic literature reviews. The inability of judging the applicability of the research in an industrial context is another important implication on the transferability of research into practice. Thus the need for accurate terminology and definitions for different global sourcing situations emerges as a way for the community to build upon each other’s work and hence making progress more quickly. In this paper we first investigate the state of the use of the GSE jargon concluding that terminology is very diverse (many synonyms used to describe the same phenomena), often confusing (same terms used to describe different phenomena) and occasionally ambiguous (few terms used to describe several phenomena). In order to address the identified problems, we conducted a Delphi-inspired study with ten well-established researchers in GSE and developed an empirically based glossary for the key concepts in global software engineering. We then propose a taxonomy for GSE by categorizing the selected terms based on generalization-specialization relationships and illustrate how the taxonomy can be used to categorize and map existing knowledge. The contribution targets future researchers, who will publish or synthesize further empirical work and practitioners, who are interested in published empirical cases. Therefore this work is expected to make a contribution to the future development of research in the GSE field, and alleviate understandability and transferability of existing and future knowledge into practice.

A Reference Model for Global Software Development: Findings from a Case Study

The purpose of this paper is to present a reference model for global software development, based on the results found in a case study conducted in two software development units from multinational organizations located in Brazil. A preliminary description of this model was originally published in 2004. In this paper, we present the reference model in detail, improving the description and discussing the factors that enable multinationals corporations to operate successfully across geographic and cultural boundaries. At the end, we also discuss a preliminary evaluation of the reference model usage

Usage of SCRUM Practices within a Global Company

Global companies that experimented extensive waterfall phased plans are trying to improve their existing processes to expedite team engagement. SCRUM has become an acceptable path to follow for those companies because it comprises project management as part of its practices. SCRUM has been used with the objective of simplifying project control through simple processes, easy to update documentation and higher team iteration over exhaustive documentation. Instead of investing team effort on producing static documentation, SCRUM proposes to focus on team continuous improvement aiming to add value to business processes. The purpose of this industry report is to describe two projects that experimented SCRUM practices within a globally distributed company. This company has development centers across North America, South America and Asia. This report covers challenges faced by the project teams, strengths and practical recommendations of using SCRUM in a globally distributed environment.

Software configuration management over a global software development environment: lessons learned from a case study

Software configuration management is an important support activity in the software development process. In global environments, the software configuration becomes critical due to the characteristics of the distributed development (physical distance, cultural differences, trust, communication and other factors). The objective of this paper is to analyze the software configuration management in a global software development environment, identifying the main challenges. The results are based on a case study carried on at a multinational organization that has offshore software development centers in Brazil, India and Russia, and was recently recognized in the CMM Model level 2 in the Brazilian unit. The results suggest the necessity to adapt and implement some activities in the software configuration management process addressing the main existing challenges. These activities were identified as lessons learned, collected at the end of each project. The problems and the solutions adopted are presented, aiming to relate these solutions to the organization distribution level, considering the project team, users and customers.

Global Software Processes Definition in a Distributed Environment

Global software development projects are passing through the boundaries of a company or a country. In order to manage global teams effectively, it is necessary to define a software process adapted to different organizational cultures. A global software process gives all team members a common language to define tasks and activities allowing the better understanding of the business domain terms and the project milestones in spite of their differences in terms of culture and organizational structures. This paper presents the practices adopted to define a global software process for a distributed environment and the factors that impacted in the process definition

The evolution of agile software development in Brazil

Agile software development methods have been increasingly adopted worldwide and became one of the mainstream software development approaches. Agile methods have also had an impact on software engineering education with universities adapting their courses to accommodate this new form of software development. Software engineering research has tried to evaluate the impact of agile methods in industrial projects and discover in which situations it is beneficial to apply such methods. However, there are almost no studies focusing on the progress of the agile movement in Brazil. In this paper, we present an overview of the evolution of the agile movement in Brazil, outlining the history of its first advocates in academia and industry. We describe existing educational initiatives, discuss the impact of the agile development on the national research, and present a report on the agile state-of-the-practice in the Brazilian IT industry.

Globally distributed system developers: their trust expectations and processes

Trust remains a challenge in globally distributed development teams. In order to investigate how trust plays out in this context, we conducted a qualitative study of 5 multi-national IT organizations. We interviewed 58 individuals across 10 countries and made two principal findings. First, study participants described trust in terms of their expectations of their colleagues. These expectations fell into one of three dimensions: that socially correct behavior will persist, that team members possess technical competency, and that individuals will demonstrate concern for others. Second, our study participants described trust as a dynamic process, with phases including formation, dissolution, adjustment and restoration. We provide new insights into these dimensions and phases of trust within distributed teams which extend existing literature. Our study also provides guidelines on effective practices within distributed teams in addition to providing implications for the extension of software engineering and collaboration tools.