Global Software Engineering and its Challenges

You can download the paper from here: Päivi Parviainen - Global Software Engineering and its challenges
You can download the presentation from here: Global Software Engineering and its Challenges

Global Software Engineering and its Challenges

Abstract:

Global Software Engineering means product-development activity that involves two or more companies, departments or teams that combine their competencies and technologies to create new shared value while, at the same time, managing their respective costs and risks.

Global Software Engineering has a number of potential benefits, including
• Shortening time-to-market cycles by using time-zone differences.
• Improving the ability to quickly respond to local customer needs.
• Organizations benefit from access to a larger qualified resource pool with the promise of reduced development costs.
• Innovation, as the mix of developers with different cultural backgrounds may trigger new ideas.
• To reduce development costs, to acquire competence (technology competence or knowledge of a specific market)
• To avoid investing in a company's non-core competence areas.

The general risks mentioned in the Paper are:
• had to do with the openness of communication between partners; for example, problem-hiding may be an issue in customer supplier relations.
• Furthermore, unclear assignments, lack of trust between partners, difficulties in agreeing on intellectual property rights and the unreliability of the partners development schedule were seen as risk factors for any mode of collaboration.
• From the suppliers or licencor's viewpoint, the risks mentioned concerned the continuation of the collaboration in the future and predicting the most sale-able product features correctly during road-mapping.
• From the customers point of view, the quality of the acquired product (e.g.,reliability and performance) and becoming too dependent on one partner were seen as risks.
• Finally, competence issues such as the competence of new partner's and a weakening of ones own competence were also mentioned as risks.

Objectives of Paper:

1. It talks about various GSE interaction modes like Hierarchical, Swap meet, Asymmetrical and Dialogic.
2. It describes about mode of collaboration : 1. Equity and non-equity. 2. Upstream, horizontal and downstream. 3. Dyadic alliances, alliance constellations and alliance networks. 4.Explorative and exploitative.
3. Capturing the industrial views under Contracting and requirements definition, Project planning and tracking, Architecture analysis/design, Integration and testing, Co-operative work.
4. It talks about modes for coordinating R and D work across multiple sites like Functional areas of expertise, Product structure, Process steps, Customization.
5. Root causes of challenges into Basic Circumstance, derivative cause and Consequent Cause.

Motivation for Paper:

1. As World market is getting closer day by day, It is necessary to understand the benefits and risks involved in Global software engineering.
2. Detailed viewpoint of the stakeholders involved can help to understand the challenges at the root level and help to solve it at lower level, thus not eliciting such problems to the higher level of decisions.
3. This paper is a step towards better, more productive and higher quality GSE, as it helps companies to be aware and address potential challenges early via the GSE framework.
4. Although GSE is common, it is still challenging and companies should carefully weigh the benefits and costs of doing the work in distributed setting vs. doing it single site.
5. Analyzing the problems in more detail helps to improve situation that can be implemented in practice. Under the current market pressures, companies need to use their existing resources(also global resource and expertise pool) as effectively as possible.

Lessons learned through the Paper:

           For a successful implementation of any project, It is very necessary to carry out background knowledge, survey to better understand the scenarios that can come across. Hence, better preparation of solutions can be implemented to minimize the risk and to increase benefit to cost ratio. 

The risk associated with GSE are: Project-delivery failures, Insufficient quality, Distance and culture

clashes, Staff turnover (mostly for captive centre's), Poor supplier services (only for outsourced GSE), Instability with overly high change rates, Insufficient competences, Wage and cost inflation, Lock-in (only for outsourced GSE), Inadequate IPR management etc.

The top-five challenges for GSE were effective communication, cultural differences, coordination, time-zone differences and trust.

The reasons or causes for these Challenges are: Communication breakdown (loss of communication richness), Coordination break-down, Control breakdown (geographical dispersion), Cohesion barriers (loss of teamness) and Culture clash (cultural differences). 

The root causes can be classified into:

1. Basic Circumstances: Caused by Time difference and distance, Multiple parties/ Stakeholders. 

2. Derivative Cause: Lack of communication, communication breakdown, different backgrounds and tacit knowledge. 

3. Consequent Cause : Lack of Teamness, Trust.

Concluding Remarks

In Today’s market, the increasingly complex and competitive market situation has resulted in Global Software Engineering (GSE) becoming more and more common practice. Companies need to use their existing resources as effectively as possible.They also need to employ resources on a global scale from different sites within the-company and even from partner companies throughout the world, in order to produce software at a competitive level.Thus, the ability to collaborate effectively has become a critical factor in today’s software development.

The main expected benefits from GSE are improvements in development time, being closer to the customers and having flexible access to better specialized and less costly resources. Main reasons behind this productivity drop are misunderstood or mismatched processes between teams, and poor visibility into and

control of the development activities atall sites involved. This paper helps us to understand and improve the situation that is in practice in companies.