Success Factors for Software Development Projects through Collaboration between Japan and India

The importance of developing software through global collaboration has increased in recent years, but such projects are not always successful. Collaborations involving embedded systems development, where a high degree of software and hardware coordination is required and where development depends heavily on tacit knowledge, are especially challenging. This study focuses on software development projects involving collaboration between a client in Japan and a vendor in India. We define success as a situation in which both the client and the vendor enjoy long-term benefits from the project, then identify factors that affect success and propose a methodology for evaluating global collaborative software development projects based on these factors. We then apply our proposed evaluation methodology to 13 actual projects and suggest that project success or failure could be predicted by evaluations based on the proposed methodology. Theoretical contributions of this study include defining nine success factors with clear evaluation criteria, five of which are already recognized in global software development and proposing an evaluation method based on these definitions. The practical contribution is that applying the proposed evaluation methodology can lead to successful projects in practice.