Towards Process-Based Collaboration in Global Software Engineering

Globalization is one of the big trends in software development. Development projects need a variety of different resources with appropriate expert knowledge to be successful. More and more of these resources are nowadays obtained from specialized organizations and countries all over the world, varying in development approaches, processes, and culture. As seen with early outsourcing attempts, collaboration may fail due to these differences. Hence, the major challenge in global software engineering is to streamline collaborating organizations towards a successful conjoint development. Based on typical collaboration scenarios, this paper presents a structured approach to integrate processes in a comprehensible way.

I. Introduction

Globalization is one of the key success factors for business in general and software development in particular. The portion of (globally) distributed development projects across different locations, countries, and continents has increased significantly in the last decades [7], [8]. One of the underlying reasons is the need of complementary knowledge and complementary skills for developing various products. As most organizations have specialization as one of their company strategy goals, they are coerced to collaborate. That is, buying all work which someone else could make cheaper, including, but not limited to outsourcing development to low cost countries.