Global Software Engineering

Offshore outsourcing across the world has triggered a new social structure in the way global businesses operate, resulting in emerging virtual social spaces between clients and vendors. These social structures involve understanding of cultural connections over space and time through telecommunication networks, as knowledge intensive tasks are being realized across national boundaries. Clients and vendors belonging to diverse cultures are required to take measures to build trust in relationships for sustained professional success. This paper looks at the trust building practice and experience of four small and medium sized software vendor organizations based in New Zealand and India. The case study data reveals how vendors are sensitized to client apprehensions in sharing knowledge across virtual social spaces. Some practices identified are face-to-face communication to bring visibility of social cue codes, documentation as a common thread of control, international accreditations to ...

Offshore outsourcing across the world has triggered a new social structure in the way global businesses operate, resulting in emerging virtual social spaces between clients and vendors. These social structures involve understanding of cultural connections over space and time through telecommunication networks, as knowledge intensive tasks are being realized across national boundaries. Clients and vendors belonging to diverse cultures are required to take measures to build trust in relationships for sustained professional success. This paper looks at the trust building practice and experience of four small and medium sized software vendor organizations based in New Zealand and India. The case study data reveals how vendors are sensitized to client apprehensions in sharing knowledge across virtual social spaces. Some practices identified are face-to-face communication to bring visibility of social cue codes, documentation as a common thread of control, international accreditations to ...

Globalization in software development introduced significant changes in the way organizations operate today. Software is nowadays produced by team members from geographically, temporally and culturally remote sites. Organizations seek for benefits that global market offers and face new challenges. Naturally resistant to change, these organizations often do not realize necessity for tailoring existing methods for distributed collaboration. Our empirical investigation shows a great variety in the ways organizations distribute responsibilities across remote sites and conclude that these can be divided into two main categories: joint collaboration that requires investments in team building and independent collaboration that requires investments in knowledge management and transfer. Finally we discuss practices that are applied in industry to overcome these challenges and emphasize necessity to fully understand the pros and cons of different ways to organize distributed software projects before starting a project in this new environment. . Tight budgets, shortage in resources and time has motivated many companies to start looking for partners outside. Accordingly, outsourcing and especially offshoring (relocation of business processes to a lower cost country) have become components of a new global paradigm that is based on the selection of appropriate and strategic technologies, skills and resources with the strongest potential and the lowest cost within the global marketplace. The decision to source software development to an overseas firm is looked at frequently in simple economic terms -it's cheaper, and skilled labor is easier to find . The list of assumed benefits of global software engineering (GSE) also includes the necessity of reaching mobility in resources, obtaining extra knowledge through deploying the most talented people around the world, speeding time-to-market, increasing operational efficiency, improving quality, expanding through acquisitions, reaching proximity to market and many more. However, a recent empirical investigation shows that these benefits are neither clear-cut nor can their realization be taken for-granted as the GSE literature may lead one to believe . After a decade of experimentations companies come to realize that blind cost reduction strategies tend to fail. And the reason for this is distinction between manufacturing of goods and intellectual work. It is not a secret that manufacturing has spread globally, and even branded products are nowadays developed by emerging nations. Software industry follows this trend and leads towards massproduction of software components following standardized product-line approaches. India and China became well known phenomenally growing software development centers. Smaller nations are also competing with each other for their best deals from the world leading contractors. However, in contradiction to manufacturing, distribution of intellectual work is not as easy as it may seem. No matter how much companies try to industrialize software development processes by developing small pieces that would be integrated into a product at the end, the process of software development significantly depend on human interaction. In contrast to other engineering disciplines, where actual development is based on stable plans and technical designs, software engineering is suffering from rapid changes in requirements throughout the development life cycle. And if a co-located team can cope with uncertainty and changes more effectively, distribution of software life cycle activities among team members separated by contextual, organizational, cultural, temporal, and geographical boundaries introduces significant difficulties in managing interdependencies. Virtual and often asynchronous environment that characterize globally distributed projects affect the way team members interact and communicate and form an iceberg of problems that are often hidden to an unfamiliar eye.

Global Software Development (GSD) involves multiple sites which comprise of different cultures and time zones apart from geographical locations. It is a common software development approach adopted to achieve competitiveness. However, due to multiple challenges it can result in misunderstandings and rework. Rework raises the chance of project failure by delaying the project and increasing the estimated budget. The aim of this study is to identify and categorize the rework causes to reduce its frequency in GSD. To identify the empirical literature related to causes of rework, we performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). A total of 23 studies are included as a result of final inclusion. The empirical literature from the year 2009 to 2020 is searched. The overall identified causes of rework in GSD are categorized into 6 major categories which are communication, Requirement Management (RM), roles of stakeholders, product development/integration issues, documentation issues, and differences among stakeholders. The most reported rework causes are related to the category of communication & coordination and RM. Moreover, an industrial survey is conducted to validate the identified rework causes and their mitigation practices from practitioners. This study will help practitioners and researchers in addressing the identified causes and therefore reduce the chances of rework.

takeholders are the backbone of any organization and play a vital role in the completion of any product. Different stakeholders with different roles, skills, natures, and experiences are involved throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Unlike other phases of SDLC, Requirement Engineering (RE) requires more stakeholders, active participation, focus, and collaboration. However, stakeholder involvement makes the RE phase more difficult and impacts other phases of Software Development. The inherent complexity of the RE phase is due to numerous factors, including diverse skill sets, language disparities, comprehension issues, and lack of interest, thereby rendering it particularly challenging for stakeholders. Literature also highlights some practices to resolve these issues, like enhancing communication and building trust among team members to overcome these challenges, but still, all these challenges affect software development in one way or another, and lead projects toward failure.

Global software outsourcing (GSO) is the outsourcing of software development to sub-contractors outside the client organisation’s home country. India remains the unquestioned leader, registering average annual growth of more than 40% over the last decade and developing some US$3.6bn-worth of software for foreign clients in 1999/2000 (Heeks, 2000). Advice for potential GSO clients counsels starting small, starting at home, and starting with programmers (McFarlan, 1996). Many client organisations have followed this advice, putting a toe into the GSO waters through small-scale body shopping: for example, having Indian sub-contractor staff come over to the client site to complete a minor, non-critical piece of coding/conversion work.

This paper describes lessons from running software development projects across three globally distributed educational institutions. What was innovative about this study was that two of the institutions were located in service providing countries, conventional onshore/offshore roles were reversed, and students were exposed to the realities of global supply chain management. Three teams of US students were tasked to develop three different software products for Cambodian clients, while subcontracting the database component to third-party teams of Indian students. This paper details the role of the three institutions, the prerequisites for planning and logistics for running such educational projects, and summarises the findings, while drawing broader parallels with the commercial world of offshore and outsourced development. It ends with recommendations for software engineering education to better reflect the needs and skills demanded of right sourcing in the global marketplace. These extend more generally to global software engineering.

Dedico este trabalho a meus pais José e Leonor por sempre ter acreditado, apoiado e conduzido sem medir esforços, por me dar amor, exemplo e cuidar de minha educação sempre. iii Agradecimentos Aprendi, mais do que posso imaginar, sobre muitas coisas da vida ao realizar o mestrado. Essas coisas não cabem neste documento, mas nele estão registrados parte desse aprendizado e meus profundos agradecimentos: Agradeço primeiro a Deus por sempre me acompanhar e me proteger, me dando forças nos momentos difíceis da vida e a meus pais José e Leonor por me permitir e me dar à oportunidade de demonstrar-lhes que tudo é possível nesta vida através de esforço e dedicação, eles sempre me deram exemplo, ajuda e o apoio para que eu crescera como profissional e como ser humano. Um agradecimento especial ao meu Orientador o Prof. Dr. Sergio Takeo Kofuji por toda a sua dedicação, apoio, entusiasmo, capacidade intelectual, disponibilidade e por confiar em mim. Foram fatores importantes para que este trabalho de mestrado se realizasse. Agradeço também aos membros da banca de mestrado, pela paciência em ler meu trabalho e pelas suas valiosas sugestões e comentários. Agradeço ao grupo PAD, do LSI, da Escola Politécnica da USP por seu companheirismo e amizade. À equipe de HumanLab do Grupo PAD por seu apoio em tudo momento. Um agradecimento os meus irmãos Duberly e Lizbeth que sempre estiveram comigo em todos meus passos neste projeto, por seu apoio espiritual e moral muito importante para meu desempenho. Agradeço a meu querido esposo Edwar por participar de mais uma jornada a meu lado, passamos por bons momentos e também por momentos difíceis durante o mestrado. Graças a ele, os momentos difíceis foram enfrentados com sabedoria e os bons momentos foram comemorados com muita alegria. E um agradecimento especial a todas aquelas pessoas que deram seu apoio incondicional com seu tempo, seu conhecimento e sua experiência. Nos últimos anos, o volume de dados e de informações disponíveis pelas RSSF cresceu consideravelmente por ser uma tecnologia que permite o desenvolvimento de aplicações em diversos tipos de ambientes (pervasivos, ubíquos, ambientes controlados e de difícil acesso), fazendo com que a preocupação em gerenciar esse conteúdo se tornasse maior. Dentre as propostas apresentadas, um grande número utiliza ontologias como forma de organizar e categorizar dados; existem duas questões chaves na gerência de dados nas redes de sensores sem fio: o armazenamento de dados e o processamento da consulta. O presente trabalho propõe uma abordagem semântica para o gerenciamento dos dados dinâmicos e estáticos da rede, oferecendo um serviço de metadados sobre as RSSF e suas aplicações; esta técnica baseia-se na construção de ontologias que permitem escalabilidade, incremento de eficiência das atividades do ambiente e reusabilidade. Verificou-se mediante testes realizados baseados em consultas sobre a ontologia que o modelo proposto é apropriado, e que a busca baseada em semântica resulta na obtenção de dados das RSSF de forma mais adequada, quanto comparada com as abordagens tradicionais. Palavras chaves: redes de sensores sem fio, semântica, ontologias, conhecimento, computação pervasiva.

This paper presents the interview findings of the current situation in software development for Executive Information Systems (EIS) in the Thai telecommunications industry and identifies critical success factors (CSFs) that can serve as requisite requirements for a software process maintenance framework in this context. The results show that software development teams do not perceive existing formal routines as an efficient way to manage software development processes and eventually to deliver quality results. One of the factors that play a central role in quality software development is an efficient software process. Efficiency requires project management activities to enable the proper task execution. Unfortunately, existing agile methods, e.g., Scrum and XP offer only inadequate support for project management, e.g., limited support for subcontracting and developing software that demands high level of quality control. For continuously efficient software processes, this study thus proposes a framework aimed at the establishment and improvement of software development processes covering adequate software engineering and project management perspectives. The overall goal of the resulting framework therefore is to contribute to the improvement of software process development.

This paper summarizes the results of the First Workshop on Arc-hitecting in Global Software Engineering (GSE), which was or-ganized in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2011). The workshop aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners for defining and advancing the state-of-the-art and state-of-the practice in architecture design of global software development systems.

Scrum framework is a growing trend in software industry to companies that are looking for development agile ways. In their early days, this methodology required that the working team members were established in a unique room, because it is necessary to have great communication and working together. However, it is a common increasingly practice that the teams are in geographically dispersed places, which means that it is necessary to adapt and/or look for the way that this methodology is suitable in these contexts. There are many experiences in the industry where we can see communication issues due to this kind work. In this paper we will briefly explain the Scrum framework definition, the Global Software Development (GSD) context, and the practices used in different case studies to solve the issues when applying Scrum in GSD.

RESUMEN. Este artículo presenta una panorámica general del estado del arte y de la práctica del Desarrollo Global de Software (DGS), analizando las principales revisiones sistemáticas de la literatura e identificando un conjunto de áreas de gran interés en la actualidad. El cual muestra que el DGS es un campo que empieza a alcanzar cierta madurez: cuya evolución ya no se encuentra limitada por factores críticos como las diferencias lingüísticas y culturales, sino que ésta depende más de factores como la motivación personal y las habilidades de los recursos humanos, y de la disponibilidad de funciones y responsabilidades bien definidas; y, al mismo tiempo, presenta nuevos desafíos centrados en importantes líneas de interés como: los Procesos para desarrollo y gestión, la Gestión de Proyectos DGS y los Equipos de Trabajo. ABSTRACT. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art and the practical of Global Software Development (DGS), analyzing the main systematic reviews of the literature and identifying a set of areas of great interest today. Which shows that the DGS is a field that begins to reach a certain maturity: whose evolution is no longer limited by critical factors such as language and cultural differences, but it depends more on factors such as personal motivation and skills of resources human, and the availability of clearly defined roles and responsibilities; and at the same time, presents new challenges focused on important areas of interest include: Processes for development and management, DGS Project Management and Task Forces.

Setting up the infrastructure to manage a software project can become a task as significant writing the software itself. A variety of useful open source tools are available, such as Web-based viewers for version control systems, "wikis" for collaborative discussions and bugtracking systems, but their use in high-energy physics, outside large collaborations, is insubstantial. Understandably, physicists would rather do physics than configure project management tools. We introduce the CEDAR HepForge system, which provides a lightweight development environment for HEP software. Services available as part of HepForge include the above-mentioned tools as well as mailing lists, shell accounts, archiving of releases and low-maintenance Web space. HepForge also exists to promote best-practice software development methods and to provide a central repository for re-usable HEP software and phenomenology codes.

This reference model specifically addresses guiding an organisation in achieving high performing collaborative practices, and adoption of collaborative technologies to facilitate attaining ‘Leadership’ Levels across multiple domains, within and across organizations.

Based on Relational Exchange Theory (RET), this paper explores the dual role in offshore sourcing as experienced by an Irish software development company. As part of a large US based company, the Irish site acts as a "bridge" in their offshoring practices. While the US site offshores work to Ireland, the Irish site offshores work further to India. Hence, the Irish site has experience of being both customer and vendor in an IS offshoring relationship. The study reveals elements for a successful offshoring relationship and presents lessons learnt from the dual "bridge" role that emerged in our study. Furthermore, it is questioned whether this bridge role will be a viable model also in future offshoring arrangements. While temporal location will always work in Ireland's favour and be an advantage, location alone will not be enough to keep position in future offshoring arrangements. Instead, depth of expertise and experience will be even more important for future competiveness.

Global Software Development (GSD) is an emerging trend in today's software world in which teams are geographically dispersed, either in close proximity or globally. GSD provides certain advantages to development companies like low development cost, access to cheap and skilled labour etc. This type of development is noted as a more risky and challenging as compared to projects developed with teams under same roof. Inherently the nature of GSD projects are cooperative in which many software developers work on a common project, share information and coordinate activities. Coordination is a fundamental part of software development. GSD comprises different types of development systems i.e. insourcing, outsourcing, nearshoring, or farshoring, whatever the types of development systems selected by a company there exist the challenges to coordination. Therefore the knowledge of potential challenges, associated threats to coordination and practices to mitigate them plays a vital role for ...

Motivation in software engineering is reported to be a source for performance improvement, which leads to project overall success. Since it is a soft factor and difficult to quantify it is usually neglected. Research in this field is rather scarce and outdated. On the basis of a recent systematic review of software engineers' motivation we set an agenda for further investigation of the role of motivation in contemporary projects. As software organizations nowadays seek opportunities inherited in both-global software development (GSD) and agile projects, it is important to understand how different project environments influence motivation.

One organization should focus on architecture since it gives intellectual control, establishing a means of effective communication throughout the project by a common vocabulary; it makes large-scale reuse possible, by clearly articulating its components and interfaces; and it provides the basis for project development and management, orienting development teams in systematically producing different parts of a system [1]. It is known that an architecture-based approach can bring about systematic management and productivity for conventional processes. What the industry practices, analyzed in this paper, comes to show is that it is also true for geographically distributed development, and that a common architecture, orienting all the software life-cycle processes, can make the whole difference in the GSD (Global Software Development) business.

This paper presents core problem solution to security of Global Software Development Requirement Information. Currently the major issue deals with hacking of sensitive client information which may lead to major financial as well as social loss. To avoid this system provides cloud security by encryption of data as well as deployment of tool over the cloud will provide significant security to whole global content management system. The core findings are presented in terms of how hacker hacks such systems and what counter steps need to follow. Our algorithmic development provide random information storage at various cloud nodes to secure our client requirement data files.

The software industry is adopting the DevOps paradigm to an increasingly frequent extent. In addition, the trend of developing software in a distributed manner greatly increased as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced team members from software companies to work remotely. We present the results of a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) of how DevOps has been applied in distributed and global settings that adopts Global Software Development (GSD). The results were obtained from analysing 27 papers. The main conclusions obtained after carrying our SMS show that adopting DevOps in such settings by implementing certain practices brings several advantages to software companies, even though there are difficulties to be confronted when adopting DevOps in global and distributed contexts. Moreover, we (1) proposed definition of DevOps in distributed and global settings, (2) mapped the challenges detected with a list of well-known GSD risks and (3) mapped the benefits that can be obtained from applying certain practices identified and the challenges that should be overcame to obtain such benefits.

Globally distributed software engineering involves one or more of geographic, temporal or cultural distances, which empirical studies find have deleterious effects on the efficiency of the software engineering process. There have been some successful examples where one 'bridge' location has facilitated collaboration and coordination across the other locations. Managers might want to use this bridging as a tactic for future projects, even when future collaborations may be composed of very different participants and in different locations and contexts than current successfully bridged teams. However, group behaviour is complicated and establishing an effective bridge is neither a simple nor a straightforward step. We propose a set of guidelines, based on empirical findings, to help managers understand what to expect from the bridging tactic. These include cultural, organizational, individual and temporal factors as well as insights into the costs and benefits of bridging.

This paper presents a domain ontology development, based on the electronic whiteboard system, named SHAVI, that was projected to manage operational information about the work performed by the emergency department staff at the University Hospital of Maringá-HUM. The main result is the construction of a contextual knowledge base, developed first in a contextual acquisition phase and then an ontology modeling for medical emergency domain. It is expected that the proposed ontology will contribute to the data quality that are displayed on the electronic whiteboard, which must be correct and up-to-date in the system according to the hospital context, so that the health team can use them with confidence for medical decision. Resumo. Este artigo apresenta o desenvolvimento de uma ontologia, que teve como base o Sistema de Lousa Eletrônica-SHAVI, projetado para gerenciar informações operacionais do trabalho realizado pela equipe de saúde na unidade de emergência do Hospital Universitário de Maringá-HUM. O principal resultado é a construção de uma base de conhecimentos contextuais, desenvolvida primeiramente em uma fase de aquisição de contexto e em seguida pela sua modelagem em uma ontologia no domínio de emergência médica. Espera-se que a ontologia proposta contribua com a qualidade dos dados apresentados na lousa eletrônica, que devem estar corretos e atualizados no sistema de acordo com o contexto do hospital, para que a equipe de saúde possa usá-los com confiança na tomada de decisão médica.

The teaching strategy is a mixture of lectures, group workshops, and presentations, with some hours shared with CS3013. Throught the course there is a strong focus on group work reflecting a practice-oriented approach to software engineering and project programming. Aims CS2013 is a one-semester course taken by Senior Freshman students. During this course students are introduced to the discipline of software engineering and must work in groups to complete a complex software project. Groups will be managed in conjunction with more senior students taking the course CS3013. For the duration of this course, students are divided into groups, each of which is closely supervised by the course lecturer and a separate project customer. The course provides students with their first formal experience of group work. They are required to follow a rigorous process consisting initially of requirements gathering, analysis and system design. Thereafter they are required to implement a complex softwa...

Globally distributed software engineering involves one or more of geographic, temporal or cultural distances, which empirical studies find have deleterious effects on the efficiency of the software engineering process. There have been some successful examples where one 'bridge' location has facilitated collaboration and coordination across the other locations. Managers might want to use this bridging as a tactic for future projects, even when future collaborations may be composed of very different participants and in different locations and contexts than current successfully bridged teams. However, group behaviour is complicated and establishing an effective bridge is neither a simple nor a straightforward step. We propose a set of guidelines, based on empirical findings, to help managers understand what to expect from the bridging tactic. These include cultural, organizational, individual and temporal factors as well as insights into the costs and benefits of bridging.

Service Oriented Architecture has been seeing as one of the main initiatives in many organizations to provide the agility necessary to the information technology department to support business process constant changes. A great challenge during a SOA deployment is to deploy a service repository. Ontologies (for example, OWLS -Ontology Web Language for Web Services and WSMO-Web Services Modeling Ontology) have been used for service organization on these repositories. By the way, these ontologies have two main restrictions: are used only during runtime and only deal with Web Services technology for service implementation. This work has the objective to propose one SOA ontology from existing ontologies, with focus on service catalog implementation during development time and considering any kind of service implementation technology. To make this happens two ontology engineering methodologies have been used: one to develop new ontologies (SABiO-Systematic Approach for Building Ontologies) and another for ontology merge of existing services ontologies (PROMPT). The created ontology was instantiated with services from a big organization.

Inter-organizational learning and knowledge sharing management play an important role during requirements collection and implementation for any software system. In Global Software Development (GSD), its significance increase more as stakeholders are far away across the globe. In GSD where critical challenges such as language differences, geographical distance, culture differences and time zone differences exist, thus need of inter-organizational learning and knowledge sharing become more increase. This study aims to propose Inter-organizational learning and Knowledge Sharing Management Model (ILKSM) in Global Software Development to assist vendors to learn and share knowledge of successful implementation of software engineering.

Prior research has discussed and investigated how global teams bridge multiple boundaries (e.g., distance, time, culture) that separate its members and impact the coordination of their work. In this paper we report on a study we conducted at a semiconductor manufacturing company to better understand how global teams can work more effectively across one of these boundaries-time separation. More specifically, we investigate how time zones affect coordination costs and other coordination outcomes, and which coordination processes and mechanism are more effective in helping overcome the difficulties associated with time separation. The study was conducted through semi-structured interviews of 23 global team members working on technical projects in several locations around the globe.

Software offshore outsourcing is strong pillar of software development. Software offshore outsourcing involves many risks, due to internal or external factors, that must be recognized and managed. Each organization that deals with the offshore outsourcing must be well aware of all the risk factors and barriers in the offshore outsourcing to maintain the quality of their product. It is very important for the Pakistan’s software industry to improve and maintain the quality of the products with minimal risk and compete with other countries in offshore outsourcing. The problem addressed in this research article is to minimize the risks occurring in offshore software outsourcing. For that purpose, we propose some offshore outsourcing risk mitigation guidelines for the software industry of Pakistan. We use empirical analysis and the qualitative method. A comprehensive literature review is carried out. The risk factors related to offshore outsourcing specifically for Pakistan’s software in...

Based on Relational Exchange Theory (RET), this paper explores the dual role in offshore sourcing as experienced by an Irish software development company. As part of a large US based company, the Irish site acts as a "bridge" in their offshoring practices. While the US site offshores work to Ireland, the Irish site offshores work further to India. Hence, the Irish site has experience of being both customer and vendor in an IS offshoring relationship. The study reveals elements for a successful offshoring relationship and presents lessons learnt from the dual "bridge" role that emerged in our study. Furthermore, it is questioned whether this bridge role will be a viable model also in future offshoring arrangements. While temporal location will always work in Ireland's favour and be an advantage, location alone will not be enough to keep position in future offshoring arrangements. Instead, depth of expertise and experience will be even more important for future competiveness.

In existing global software development (GSD) literature, much focus has been on identifying the challenges that practitioners may face (such as socio-cultural and temporal distance issues), while potential benefits have not been extensively analyzed. We reverse this trend by studying these potential benefits. We question whether they are well-founded assumptions and whether they are attainable in practice. This paper presents findings from a multi-case study at three multinational companies that have extensive experience in GSD. We identify the benefits mentioned in GSD literature, analyze them with regards to the companies' experiences and then conclude whether or not each benefit is being realized in practice. Our findings reveal that several of the assumed benefits are simply unattainable.

This paper presents a psychological contract perspective on the use of open source as an offshore outsourcing strategy – open-sourcing as we term it here. Building on previous research on IS outsourcing, a theoretical framework for understanding commercial software organizations involvement in open source software (OSS) is derived. The framework is used in a qualitative case study involving a commercial organization, the Irish-based global middleware company IONA, as the customer, and representatives from the open source community as suppliers of services to IONA. The study reveals an ongoing shift from OSS as a community of individual developers to OSS as a community of commercial organizations, primarily small to medium-sized enterprises. It also reveals that outsourcing to the OSS community provides ample opportunity for companies to

Global software development (GSD) is a phenomenon that is receiving considerable interest from companies all over the world. In GSD, stakeholders from different national and organizational cultures are involved in developing software and the many benefits include access to a large labour pool, cost advantage and round-the-clock development. However, GSD is technologically and organizationally complex and presents a variety of challenges to be managed by the software development team. In particular, temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances impose problems not experienced in traditional systems development. In this paper, we present findings from a case study in which we explore the particular challenges associated with managing GSD. Our study also reveals some of the solutions that are used to deal with these challenges. We do so by empirical investigation at three US based GSD companies operating in Ireland. Based on qualitative interviews we present challenges related to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance.

In existing global software development (GSD) literature, much focus has been on identifying the challenges that practitioners may face (such as sociocultural and temporal distance issues), while potential benefits have not been extensively analyzed. We reverse this trend by studying these potential benefits. We question whether they are well-founded assumptions and whether they are attainable in practice. This paper presents findings from a multicase study at three multinational companies that have extensive experience in GSD. We identify the benefits mentioned in GSD literature, analyze them with regards to the companies' experiences and then conclude whether or not each benefit is being realized in practice. Our findings reveal that the realization of the assumed benefits cannot be simply taken for granted.

Introduction Global Software Development (GSD) is increasingly becoming the normal practice in the software industry, readily evidenced by U.S. estimates that the value of the offshore software development market has increased 25-fold over the past 10 years, to the extent that one-quarter of U.S. spending on application development, integration and management services is expected to go off-shore according to recent predictions. There are many potential benefits that can arise from GSD. The most frequently cited one is that of reduced development costs due to the salary savings possible. Also, GSD can lead to reduced development duration due to greater time zone effectiveness as companies practice the so-called 'follow-the-sun' software development model. GSD also affords new opportunities for cross-site modularization of development work, potential access to a larger and better-skilled developer pool, and the possibility of greater innovation, learning and transfer of best p...

Based on Relational Exchange Theory (RET), this paper explores the dual role in offshore sourcing as experienced by an Irish software development company. As part of a large US based company, the Irish site acts as a "bridge" in their offshoring practices. While the US site offshores work to Ireland, the Irish site offshores work further to India. Hence, the Irish site has experience of being both customer and vendor in an IS offshoring relationship. The study reveals elements for a successful offshoring relationship and presents lessons learnt from the dual "bridge" role that emerged in our study. Furthermore, it is questioned whether this bridge role will be a viable model also in future offshoring arrangements. While temporal location will always work in Ireland's favour and be an advantage, location alone will not be enough to keep position in future offshoring arrangements. Instead, depth of expertise and experience will be even more important for future competiveness.

Based on the 3C Collaboration Model, this article descries the mapping of a variety of collaboration forms onto interrelationships between communication, coordination and cooperation. In order to investigate how to provide computational support for these three functional collaboration dimensions the analysis shifts from the interrelationships between these three dimensions to their intra-relationships. Finally, Gestalt psychology principles are used to discuss the suitability of the approach to human perception.

Software development is an activity that makes intensive use of knowledge. The reduction of face-to-face communication in Global Software Development Environments (GSD), make exponentially important to use Knowledge Management in these environments, which is performed by Practices of Knowledge Management. This study presents an update of a systematic review of Practices of Knowledge Management in GSD. The main contribution of this study relates to the identification of other practices, including sharing of the "social conscience", which gives for people the ability to identify themselves within the work context, improving the interaction, the performance of activities and also trust between individuals.

Outsourcing emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are expected to impact organisations significantly, due to a tight labour market for AI expertise. However, how formal and relational governance effects Information Systems suppliers who provide AI services has not been studied. Based on an exploratory research amongst eight suppliers and two market research advisors, we conducted 18 expert interviews and found evidence how formal contractual and relational governance affects AI outsourcing. The results indicate various forms of contractual models in which some cater for clients' needs specifically, e.g. outcome-based, experiencedriven Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Our examination provides insights that formal and relational Information Systems (IS) outsourcing governance are complementary in cases where clients and suppliers co-develop AI. For our research, we adapted the outsourcing governance model of Lioliou et al. (Inf Syst J 24:503-535, 2014), including their emphasis on the psychological contract. We contribute to IS outsourcing literature by exploring, beyond contract management insights, differences between suppliers in providing AI services. Our study acknowledges that AI outsourcing shift the emphasis from a transactional type of arrangement to a relational type of outsourcing arrangement. In addition, the combination of both formal and relational governance mechanisms positively contributes to IS governance. Our study also confirms that the innovative character of AI positively contributes to the psychological contract in outsourcing AI.

Strategic Information Systems outsourcing refers to the long term outsourcing of systems with a major transformational impact on the client's business strategy. Such outsourcing arrangements mitigate risks through closely aligned client and vendor business/IT operational processes and shared strategic vision. Strategic outsourcing arrangements rely on both contractual and relational governance to build inter-firm alignment capability. This research paper defines a multi-item measure of clientvendor alignment capability, and uses that instrument to survey a number of North America based oil and gas exploration and energy producing firms, who have undertaken the outsourcing of strategic information systems to an Indian information systems vendor. The results indicate which elements of contractual and relational outsourcing governance support the building of client-vendor alignment and whether alignment capability improves outsourcing success factors.

Effective software project management plays an important role during requirements collection and implementation for any software system. In Global Software Development (GSD), its significance increase more as stakeholders are far away across the globe. In GSD, challenges such as language differences and time zone differences cause significant barrier during requirements collection and thus need of effective project management increase more and more to handle challenges of GSD. This study address possible solutions and practices for effective global software project management. Through Systematic Literature Review (SLR), 25 practices are identified. These practices will help software vendors to better manage software projects in GSD.

The progress of Information and Communication Technologies has significantly promoted the relationships among people of different geographical regions. Under this novel context, new settings of software development teams arise, known as virtual teams. The objective is to identify, evaluate and synthesize reported research about the measurement of interpersonal trust (IpT) in virtual software teams (VST). We conducted a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature published in the research area until July 2019. We reviewed 747 papers, of which 11 primary studies were considered relevant for the investigation. Most studies (8 of 11) use instruments of direct measurements (interviews and questionnaires) to measure interpersonal trust. Studies that use indirect measurements focus on different characteristics of the virtual software team (agreeableness, affective lexicon, delegation, positive tone, acceptance of knowledge, etcand others). Recomiendo: Most studies (10 of 11) report that interpersonal trust measurements improve performance aspects of virtual software teams. Among them the willingness to share information, goodwill towards others, motivation, collaboration, and effectiveness. Most studies use questionnaires or interviews, but we believe that software repository mining to obtain IpT levels will be an auspicious research trend in the future. The attribute more used to assess IpT is the developer opinion. Other attributes used are emotions, interactions between developers, biography, acceptance of knowledge, and assignment of tasks. IpT measurement is a useful tool for decision-making in VTS management, especially in agile software processes, but there is little evidence of its use.

When preparing students for an industrial or academic career in software engineering, educational institutions need to address the globally distributed character of the software engineering profession. As it will be difficult to have students actually participating in a real-life, multi-site, globally dispersed, industrial project and thus acquiring knowledge from experience, there is a challenge to properly prepare students for their future jobs. One way to teach the dynamics of global development is by letting students participate in a game in which these dynamics are at the core. In this paper a board game is presented that can be used for such a purpose. The paper presents a description of the game and the findings from a controlled experiment to test its learning effectiveness. Because of the geographical distribution of the company the cost of meeting face-to-face increases, both in money and in time, and therefore these meetings become less common. When working geographically distributed, people have less informal interactions [13][14], experience an increased effort to initiate contact [15] and communicate less effective in general. These challenges can result in a lack of shared understanding [1][14], a lack of teamness [1] and a reduction of trust [16], all of which can cause a degradation of both the efficiency and quality of the work. The existence of the temporal and socio-cultural distances has similar effects. Because of the temporal distance the amount of overlap in working time is reduced [15][17] which can result in delay of communication [12][18] and a decrease of communication in general. Finally, a socio-cultural distance within a team can result in misunderstandings [1] and therefore a decrease of communication effectiveness. An overview of the benefits and challenges of GSE can be found in [19].

Software engineering is by nature a highly collaborative activity and being able to collaborate effectively is a key factor for project success. However, collaborating effectively in Global Software Engineering, in which team members are geographically, temporally and socio-culturally separated from each other, is an important challenge. In a traditional colocated Software Engineering setting, one of the most important communication patterns is a conversation. Technological support to have conversations in a distributed setting is commonly used, however overhearing conversations of your colleagues is mostly not feasible with these tools. To explore the importance of overhearing conversations we conducted a focus group and a questionnaire in a large international software development company. In this paper we report on the qualitative data from the focus group and the quantification of this data researched with the questionnaire. Based on these findings we will make recommendations on how to support overhearing conversations in Global Software Engineering.

Software and IT industries are today truly global and so is Software Engineering. High-tech companies are now located in more than 100 countries, making Global Software Engineering (GSE) a fact of life. The Internet has facilitated a massive dispersion of high-tech work and has completely changed how we humans deal with time and distance. However, the dispersion over time and space require novel techniques, tools, and practices from many disciplines to overcome challenges and to take advantage of all the opportunities that global software engineering offers. Developing software has become a global phenomenon with both successes and failures. At the same time, the software industry has been quick to take advantage of all the opportunities that global software engineering offers but it is still learning to overcome the challenges that distance brings in. This special section on Global Software Engineering consists of two papers that present innovative ideas on not only how to resolve the challenges of time and distance, but also on how to cope with the growing complexity of effectively managing GSE work.