Toward Unveiling the Execution of Large-Scale Agile Project in Global Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

Global Software Development (GSD) has emerged as a promising strategy for reducing software development costs. However, the adoption of GSD also brings forth various challenges. The geographical and socio-cultural dispersion of stakeholders can lead to ineffective communication and coordination, resulting in project delays. Moreover, executing large-scale agile projects in a global software development environment poses additional complexities, such as team coordination, customer collaboration, and knowledge transfer. This research aims to identify the key challenges faced in implementing large-scale agile projects in GSD environments and provide best practices to address these challenges. The state-of-the-art of this study is the identification of barriers and practices on scaling agile in a GSD environment and a thorough analysis and rationale on how the potential challenges could be eliminated through the practices. A systematic literature review (SLR) approach was performed using the Kitchenham framework to achieve the project objective. This paper executed six steps on planning review which led to 26 papers as primary studies that discuss the barriers faced by the teams and practices to overcome the barriers upon executing large-scale agile projects in GSD environments. The review process identified 24 challenges and 23 practices which were categorized into five categories: communication & collaboration, human resources management, project management, software methodology, and technology. This paper presented the rationale and thorough relationship on how the identified barriers could be eliminated by implementing the practices.

I. Introduction

Global Software Development (GSD) has been extensively implemented by organizations across the world. Referring to the 16^th Annual State of Agile Report, four over five of the respondents mentioned that they have agile teams distributed geographically across the globe [1]. GSD refers to a software development model where the teams are globally distributed [2]. Apart from geographical distance, GSD integrates two other dimensions: culture and temporal distances [3]. The development teams communicate, coordinate and perform software development activities virtually [4]. The rising trend of GSD implementation is affected by perceived benefits by organizations. GSD offers various advantages, covering lower development cost [5] due to cheap labor [6], access to high-skilled resources globally, shorten time-to-market [7], enhance operational efficiency, and accelerate development time through 24/7 development model [8]. Apart from the potential benefit, the adoption of GSD has various challenges. Geographical and socio-cultural scattering of stakeholders potentially causes ineffective communication and coordination [3], and a low level of team productivity which could ultimately lead to project delays [9]. Language barriers could affect misunderstanding on knowledge transfer across the team. Working in an entirely separate time zone results in mistrust [10]. These challenges need to be tackled to obtain the utmost benefit.