A case study of globally distributed software development with A-Square project.

You can download the paper from here: A case study of globally distributed software development with A-Square project. - Paper
You can download the presentation from here: A case study of globally distributed software development with A-Square project. - Presentation

Implementation of Global software development : a Structured approach.

Abstract:

In Globally distributed software development (GDSD), People are separated over different locations of the world developing software together. The complexity dramatically increases due to the geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural distance. This paper identifies and analyzes problems that occurred in a GDSD project called A-SQUARE, which was carried out as a project-based course called practicum in the KAIST-CMU Master of Science in Information Technology - Software Engineering (MSIT-SE) program.
The three distance dimensions that should be managed to succeed in a project, and they are communication, coordination and control. Communication is the exchange of complete and unambiguous information, so the sender and receiver, both can have shared understanding. Coordination is the management of dependencies
among tasks for achieving a goal. Control is defined as the process of satisfying to goals, policies, standards, or quality level.

GDSD also has three major types of distance: Temporal, Geographical, and Socio-cultural.
Temporal distance is defined as a directional measure of the dislocation in time experienced by two team
members desiring to cooperate.
Geographical distance is a directional measure of the effort required for one member to visit another at the latters site.
Socio-cultural distance is defined as a directional measure of one members understanding of another members values and normative practices.

The paper discusses about a case study which achieved support from the strategies of GSD employed and evaluate for their usage of it.

Objectives of Paper:

1. The importance of strengthening of documentation (ex; ETVX with google docs) and SE PM technique (ex: wide band delphi estimation).
2. Selection of reducing dependencies among tasks by feature based assignment rather than layer based.
3. Understanding the importance of project management tools and technique for managing project artifacts.
4. Importance of documenting and tracking issues for effective sharing.
5. Importance of formal and informal communication for its much need coordination among different location team members.

Motivation for Paper:

1. Understanding the problems of Lack of project management, different cultures in communication and control dimension.
2. Understanding the difficulty in management of project artifacts at control dimension with increase in geographical and temporal distance.
3. Understanding the inefficiency of sharing issues, dealing with higher complexity tasks in collaboration dimension.
4. Evaluation of strategies employed are very necessary to achieve efficiency and increase productivity.
5. Need to evaluate the methods, processes and environments of software development for their effective use.

Lessons learned through the Paper:

           There are several points that can lead the success of GDSD projects and mitigated the effects of the problems by applying the strategies.
A. Team Building : Building cooperation and trust- enable team by making to learn backgrounds, which results higher productivity of project.
B. Secure Synchronous Communication Channel-Communication should be efficient and concise. The team members should analyze time differences among several separated sites and find overlapped hours to reach each other synchronously as a secure synchronous communication channel.
C. Follow-the-sun Approach- GDSD projects can make a good use of distributed sites time differences for boosting time-to-market of the project.

Concluding Remarks

In the paper, The problems that can occur in a GDSD environment are identified and also evaluated the strategies that the A-SQUARE team took to cope with them and discussed their effectiveness. The problems that can arise from the temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance with the A-SQUARE project are also dealt in detail and solutions are put in place and evaluated for its effectiveness.