Helena Holmström, IT University of Göteborg: Agile Approaches to Global Software Development

Interest in global software development (GSD) is rapidly growing as the software industry is experiencing increasing globalization of business. In GSD, stakeholders from different national and organizational cultures and time zones are involved in developing software and tasks at various stages of the software lifecycle may be separated and implemented at different geographic locations coordinated through the use of information and communication technologies. GSD allows for a range of new possibilities. For example, benefits such as the business advantage of having proximity to the market, the ability to exploit market opportunities through quick formation of virtual corporations and virtual teams and the possibility to use time zone differences to achieve ‘round-the-clock’ development have accelerated the interest in GSD. As a result, software development is increasingly a multisite, multicultural, globally distributed undertaking. However, while opening up for new opportunities there is little doubt that GSD presents new challenges related to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance. Especially, processes such as communication, coordination and control are challenged

Recently, agile methods have begun again to focus on the question of how to address key problems in software development. In emphasizing speed and simplicity, agile methods seek to avoid prescribing cumbersome and time-consuming processes that add little value to the software product. Instead, the focus is on individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and fast response to changes. While it is not a magic set of revolutionary new development techniques, it is a set of tried and trusted principles, well established as part of the conventional wisdom of software engineering, but which are taken to an extreme level. However, due to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance in GSD, key concepts in agile methods are more difficult to realize. For example, the opportunity for pair programming, on-site customer collaboration and face-to-face interaction is severely reduced, hence negatively influencing the way in which agile methods can be applied in GSD. While there is some preliminary research on how to apply agile methods in GSD the more common view is that agile methods are not applicable for GSD. Clearly, there is more to learn about how to apply agile methods in distributed software development.

In this presentation, I will present findings from two in-depth case studies in which we explore challenges associated with GSD and how agile practices can be applied to reduce these challenges and hence, reduce distance in GSD. Also, preliminary findings on two on-going research projects within Lero (The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre) will be presented.