Case Study of GDSD with A-Square Project

You can find the presentation slide attached here A Case Study of GDSD with A-Square project

The relevant paper present can be downloaded here Case Study of GDSD in A-SQUARE Project



Since a group of people have to work together, software development is a complex activity. In the case of globally distributed software development (GDSD), in which people separated over different locations of the world develop software together, the complexity dramatically increases due to the geographical, temporal, and sociocultural distance. In this paper, we identify and analyze from a case study various problems that people can encounter while working in a GDSD setting. We also describe the strategies that we used to solve those problems and evaluate their effectiveness.


Software development conducted by people who have geographical and temporal distance, diverse nationalities and/or different organization cultures amongst them is called globally distributed software development (GDSD), For GDSD, methods, processes and environments for typical software development may not be suitable. In particular, they were not designed for collaboration in which communication is more costly and therefore requires a more disciplined approach.


The three distance dimensions that should be managed to succeed in a project, and they are communication, coordination and control.

1. Communication is the exchange of complete and unambiguous information, so the sender and receiver, both can have shared understanding. 
2. Coordination is the  management of dependencies among tasks for achieving a goal.
3. 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 latter’s site. 
• Socio-cultural distance is defined as a directional measure of one member’s understanding of another member’s values and normative practices

PROBLEMS THAT CAUSED DIFFICULTIES AND REDUCED PRODUCTIVITY IN GDSD PROJECTS are : 

1. Lack of Project Management
2. Lack of Understanding of Different Cultures 
3. Inefficiency of Sharing Issues
4. High Complexity of the Tasks Assigned for the Legacy System Analysis
5. Difficulties in Management of Project Artifacts

There are lot of strategies to solve these problems, which has been explained in the paper.

LESSONS LEARNED

A. Team Building : Building cooperation and trust

Activities for team building improving teamwork to build the trust should be hold before or during the project.

Problems of Lack of Understanding of Different Cultures above could have been mitigated by having a study group for learning backgrounds using our team resources.

This positive effect might lead to the higher productivity of the project which results in shorter project duration and better quality of products. Therefore, these activities of team building have positive effects on management of socio-cultural distance among team members.

B. Secure Synchronous Communication Channel

If communication among team members does not go well, then it negatively affects to control and collaboration aspects of the project.

GDSD may need strict rules for enhancing documentation to enhance communication, because it is carried out by people who have different nationalities, cultures and languages.

Communication should be efficient and concise. It should not be burden and have any overhead to communication among team members through synchronous ways.

Therefore, in GDSD projects, they 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

One main advantage that GDSD projects share is partially extended work hours. It means that GDSD projects are usually distributed to several areas which have temporally distance among them. 

Typical workers in software companies usually work 9 hours. However, workers in GDSD projects can work 24 hours in a day. 

GDSD projects can make a good use of distributed sites’ time differences for boosting time-to-market of the project.