Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
early and frequent delivery of a product [4]. A major reason for the success of agile
methods is the physical collocation of development team members [4]. Some project
managers are however, using agile practices to minimize GSD challenges or risks [5,
9-11], even though researchers note that agile practices are difficult to scale up to
support distributed arrangements [6]. Although project stakeholder distribution cre-
ates challenges to using agile practices, we found some instances of success in the
literature when agile practices were used with distributed teams [7].
However, current research provides limited evidence of the effective use of agile
practices in minimizing risks of GSD processes. To address this research gap, our
research focuses on GSD coordination processes. To understand GSD coordination
difficulties, we use an existing widely known coordination framework called the
Mintzberg Work Coordination Framework [14]. In addition we conduct an industry-
based GSD case study in order to investigate the impact of using agile practices to
reduce coordination risks. The results of this case study are expected to contribute to
the body of knowledge regarding the usefulness of agile practices in minimizing co-
ordination difficulties in GSD projects.
We begin by providing the background to our research and our motivation. Section 3
briefly discusses coordination processes in software development. This section also
presents the Mintzberg framework [14] and provides a summary of GSD risks that may
impact on project coordination processes. We describe our research methodology in
section 4. In section 5 we present results from an industry case study. Section 6 dis-
cusses the limitations of the case study. We conclude with section 7, which discusses
future research.
2 Background and Motivation
In this section, we briefly discuss agile approaches in GSD and summarize the effec-
tiveness of agile practices in reducing GSD risks based on existing research.
2.1 Agile Approaches in GSD
Though both ASD and GSD appear to share several objectives such as reduced delivery
time and cost, and increased quality, there are certain differences that are expected to
pose serious problems in any effort to introduce agile practices in distributed teams. For
example, agile methods emphasize frequent interaction and communication within
collocated teams and pay less attention to upfront detailed design and heavy documenta-
tion [4]. Hence the agile community advocates the importance of close proximity and
relationships between development team members, continuously turning-out working
software, customer-developer collaboration, and quick response to requirements
changes [1]. Such agile method requirements are difficult to satisfy in a geographically
distributed project. Our Systematic Literature Review (SLR), which was concerned with
the use of Scrum in GSD projects, identified a number of risks when using agile prac-
tices [29]. Despite the risks, there is a growing interest in assessing the viability of using
agile practices for GSD projects [7]. Our SLR also identified that GSD project managers
are using several processes to reduce risk factors when using Scrum in GSD [29]. The
