# Global software engineering

###### tags: `SPM`

## Global software development

serval decades --> steady, irreversible trend toward the globalization of business, and of software-intensive high-technology businesses.

Software development is increaingly a multisite, multicultural, globally distributed undertaking.

**Globalization and software**
distances need not to be global to be important.

Solutions that help globally distributed colleagues work together more effectively will often help those in the same zip asd well.

**Dimensions of the problem**

Strategic issues
>Deciding how to divide up the work across sites if difficult.
>An ideal arrangement would let the sites operate as independently as possible while providing for easy, flexible and effective communication across sites.
>another challenge: the organization's resistance to GSD.

Cultural issues
>Cultures differ on many critical dimensions, such as the need for structure, attitudes towards hierarcky, communication styles, and sense of time.

Inadequate communication
>software development requires much communication.
>software projects have 2 complementary communication needs
>first: the more formal, official communication need a clear, well-understood interface
>second: vital communication channel can be suprisingly crippling, developers not located together have very little informal, spontaneous conversation across sites. informal "corridor talk"

Knowledge management
>without effective information and knowledge-sharing mechanisms, managers cannot exploit GSD beenfits.
>poor documentation can also cause ineffective collaborative development

Project and process management issues
>teams hand off processes between sites, the lack of synchronization can be particularly ciritical
>Synchronization requires commonly defined milestones and clear entry and exit criteria.

Technical issues
>Since networks spanning globally dispersed locations are often slow and unrealiable.
>The need to control product changes and to ensure that all concerned hear about them is much greater in GSD

## Tactical approaches for alleviating distance in global software development

To overcome the problem with distance in GSD, managers are experimenting and quickly adjusting their tactical approaches.

Examine tactics that go beyond communication technologies.

**The phenomenon of global software development(GSD)**

IT work get outsourced
Many firms are in the process of a radical push to send their key software processes offshore, and critiacal centers of software R&D are growing outside the traditional centers.

2 critical strategic reasons for moving to offstore software development: cost advantage and a large lobor pool.

our collective concept of a firm enables software globalization.

We can now more effectively coordinate over long distances.

**The critical challenge of distance**

An organization unit cannot function without coordination and control; distance creates difficulties in both.

Coordination
> the act of integrating each task with each organization unit, so unit contributes to the overall objectives.
> Orchestrating the integration often requires intense and outgoing communication

Control
>the process of adhering to goals, policies, standards, or quality levels
> Can be formal (budget, explicit guidelines) or informal (peer pressure)

coordination and control have in many ways blended together

Communication
>a mediating factor affecting both coordination and control.

Distance exacerbates coordination and control problems direcly.
Distance negatively affects communication, which in turn reduces coordination effectiveness.

The critical role of effective communication in the successful orchestration of global software project.

figure to show the impacts of distance

**Tactic 1: Reducre intensive collaboration**

A GSD maturity function that increases over time to higher levels of knowledge work. (figure under)

deal witht the transition of tasks between the Center (a firm, or unit) and Foreign Entity(another traid nation)

The foreign Entity
>engages in tasks that range from those that are well-defined and structured to tasks that are hard to define and unstructured, with an interative solution.

## Using scrum in a globally distributed project: a case study
I cannot find this free ...

## Global software development and collaboration: barriers and solutions

## Virtual teams [Guest editors' introduction].

## A conceptual framework to study the role of communication through social software for coordination in globally-distributed software teams