Benefits of Global Software Development: The Known and Unknown
Organizations are increasingly moving to the global software development (GSD) model because of significant benefits that can accrue. However, GSD is fraught with difficulties arising from geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distances. The emphasis
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o, The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland 2 Uppsala University, Sweden 3 IT University, Gothenburg, Sweden [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Abstract. Organizations are increasingly moving to the global software development (GSD) model because of significant benefits that can accrue. However, GSD is fraught with difficulties arising from geographical, temporal and sociocultural distances. The emphasis in the literature to date has typically been on how to overcome these significant challenges associated with GSD. While a number of GSD benefits have been identified in the literature, there are also a number of less obvious, what we term ‘unknown,’ potential benefits that can accrue from GSD. Here we synthesize and integrate an overall set of potential GSD benefits and categorize them according to the organizational, team and process level to which they are most applicable. The ‘unknown’ includes organization benefits, such as improved resource allocation, team benefits, such as reduced coordination cost and improved team autonomy, and process benefits, such as improved documentation and clearly defined processes. Keywords: global software development, benefits, challenges, offshoring.
1 Introduction Global software development (GSD) is a phenomenon of increasing importance, given the perennial pressures of the need to remain profitable and competitive in the global landscape. Companies can now leverage the emergence of large multi-skilled labor forces in lower-cost economies thanks to high-speed Internet-based communication links, through which the product (software code) can be quickly transferred between development sites. India and China, in particular, offer huge multi-skilled labor forces at greatly reduced cost compared with employment markets in the US and western Europe. Other countries are also making an impact, such as Brazil, Eastern Europe and Russia, Malaysia and Vietnam. GSD involves the three major types of distance: geographical, temporal, and sociocultural [1]. Single teams can be separated by these distances, essentially becoming what is often termed ‘virtual teams’. In other circumstances, a single team may have all of its resources co-located, but with heavy reliance on other teams at remote Q. Wang, D. Pfahl, and D.M. Raffo (Eds.): ICSP 2008, LNCS 5007, pp. 1 – 9, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
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P.J. Ågerfalk et al.
locations. Vast geographical distances imply the difficulty of re-locating to another of the company’s sites, and not being able to stroll over to a colleague’s desk to chat about an implementation issue. Temporal distance across multiple time zones reduces the number of overlapping working hours, forcing a heavier reliance on asynchronous communication technologies. Socio-cultural distance arises from the different national and organizational backgrounds of the people involved and exacerbates communication breakdown. Major benefits have been attributed with GSD despite the
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