Global Software Development Patterns for Project Management - Software Process Improvement - page 137

Global Software Development Patterns for
Project Management
Antti Välimäki 1 , Jukka Kääriäinen 2 , and Kai Koskimies 3
1 Metso Automation Inc, Tampere, Finland
[e-mail]
2 VTT, Oulu, Finland
[e-mail]
3 Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland
[e-mail]
Abstract. Global software development with the agile or waterfall development
process has been taken into use in many companies. GSD offers benefits but
also new challenges without known, documented solutions. The goal of this re-
search is to present current best practices for GSD in the form of process pat-
terns for project management, evaluated by using a scenario-based assessment
method. The best practices have been collected from a large company operating
in process automation. It is expected that the resulting pattern language helps
other companies to improve their GSD processes by incorporating the patterns
in the processes.
Keywords: Global Software Development, Agile, Organizational patterns,
Process patterns, Assessment.
1 Introduction
Global software development (GSD) is reality in many companies. There are many
benefits and motivations for using GSD such as access to the world-wide talent pool,
cost savings, advances in infrastructure and software development tools, mergers and
acquisitions and the need to be close to a local market [1]. However, there are also
different challenges with communication, coordination and co-operation which make
GSD more difficult than centralized development [1]. GSD has been widely used with
the waterfall development process and, recently, it has been applied to agile develop-
ment methods as well [2]. The experiences show that agile methods can be applied to
GSD [3, 4].
Whether a traditional or an agile process model is used, the problems related to the
nature of GSD have to be dealt with. Rather than developing a totally new GSD proc-
ess that addresses these problems, a more appropriate approach is to try to come up
with solutions to specific problems, and present these solutions in such a way that
they can be easily integrated with existing processes. An obvious advantage of this
approach is that a company need not adopt a new process model, but merely tune the
existing process for GSD.