Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:36:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 908948 bytes, checksum: 248d42bde9c6e2d148510a7a60d9fdfb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-05 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Taking into account the increasing adoption of projects and processes of Global Software Development (GSP), many organizations that practiced traditional software development, colocated, began to operate in the global market, dividing their collaborative units in many points of the globe. Besides the proximity to the international market, the use of GSD allows a reduction in time-to-market, improved quality of generated products, cost reduction and greater ease to find skilled labor. However, the distance between the teams involved in the GSD creates a variety of communication problems not faced in co-located development. According to NBR ISO 10006, human factor is the key to the success of software projects, since it is a genuinely human activity. In traditional development, companies use resources allocation processes to find the appropriate professional to perform a particular activity. However, geographical distance, and also the cultural and temporal factors existing in GSD are not classified in these processes. In this context, in order to reduce communication problems during the implementation phase, this work presents an approach for allocating teams in GSD projects, aiming to mitigate the problematic effects generated by the need for communication between geographically dispersed teams. Considering that the coupling between software components interferes to the communication required to develop them, the proposed approach takes into account non-technical characteristics of the teams such as temporal, cultural and affinity attributes, to discover the degree of proximity of the teams, comparing them with the level of coupling between components in order to identify which teams have better able to implement the software components with suitable quality of communication with other teams. It should be noted that the teams that are candidates for allocation based on non-technical attributes are technically qualified teams for the implementation of components. Due to the high complexity of the allocation problem, it is used a genetic algorithm with fitness evaluation based on the non-technical attributes for the allocation of the teams, making the problem computationally treatable in time. / Com a crescente adoção de projetos e processos de Desenvolvimento Distribuído de Software (DDS), muitas organizações que praticavam o desenvolvimento tradicional, co-localizado, passaram a atuar no mercado global, dividindo suas unidades colaborativas em vários pontos geográficos do globo. Além da aproximação com o mercado internacional, a utilização de DDS possibilita uma redução do time-to-market, melhor qualidade dos produtos gerados, redução de custos e maior facilidade para encontrar mão-de-obra qualificada. Entretanto, a distância entre as equipes envolvidas no DDS gera uma série de problemas relacionados a comunicação não enfrentados no desenvolvimento co-localizado. Segundo a NBR ISO 10006, o fator humano é chave para o sucesso dos projetos de software, já que é uma atividade genuinamente humana. No desenvolvimento tradicional, empresas utilizam processos de alocação de recursos humanos para encontrar os profissionais adequados para realizar uma determinada atividade. Porém, a distância geográfica, como também os fatores culturais e temporais existentes no DDS não são enquadrados nesses processos. Neste contexto, a fim de reduzir os problemas de comunicação durante a fase de implementação, o presente trabalho apresenta uma abordagem para alocação de equipes em projetos de DDS, tendo como objetivo mitigar os efeitos problemáticos gerados pela necessidade de comunicação entre as equipes geograficamente dispersas. Considerando que o acoplamento existente entre os componentes de software interfere na comunicação requerida para desenvolvê-los, a abordagem proposta leva em consideração características não-técnicas das equipes, como atributos temporais, culturais e de afinidade, para descobrir o grau de proximidade das equipes, comparando-as com o nível de acoplamento entre os componentes, de modo a identificar quais equipes possuem melhores condições de implementar os componentes de software com grau de comunicação satisfatório com as demais equipes. Deve-se destacar que as equipes candidatas à alocação com base em atributos não-técnicos são equipes tecnicamente habilitadas para a implementação dos componentes. Pela complexidade do problema de alocação ser alta, é utilizado um algoritmo genético, com função de avaliação baseada nos atributos não-técnicos para a alocação das equipes, tornando o problema tratável computacionalmente em tempo hábil.

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Context: Global software development is the emerging trend in today’s world as it provides the software companies with certain advantages like access to skill and cheap labor, low development cost etc. There are also many challenges and risks involved in globally distributed software project as compare to co-located projects like communication, coordination and control etc. due to geographical separation. There is also a recent interest in applying agile methods in offshore projects in order to minimize certain offshore challenges. Agile methods in collocated environment demands high communication, coordination and collaboration between the team members. However implementing agile methods in distributed environment is beneficial and challenging too, because of inherited GSD challenges. Therefore, it is necessary to carefully understand the benefits and challenges of applying agile methods in distributed project before actually initiating the development. Objectives: This research study aims to look at current empirical evidence regarding benefits and challenges of applying agile methods in offshore projects, in order to understand it properly. Furthermore, we have examined that which of the benefits and challenges reported in literature can be seen in practice. This helped us in finding out the similarities and differences between the benefits and challenges that are reported in literature and in practice. Methods: To fulfill our aims and objectives we have first conducted the detailed systematic review analysis of the empirical studies from year 2000-2010. The systematic review approach helped us to collect and summarize the empirical data available regarding the benefits and challenges of applying agile methods in offshore projects. The research studies were identified from the most authentic databases that are scientifically and technically peer reviewed such as Inspec and Compendex, IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library, Springer Link, Science Direct, Google Scholar, Scopus, ISI Web of Knowledge and Willey Inter Science Journal Finder. Furthermore, industrial survey was conducted in order to identify whether the benefits and challenges enlisted in literature can be confirmed by practitioners. This helped us in determining the similarities and differences between benefits and challenges that are reported in empirical literature and industrial survey. Results: From systematic review results, we have found the list of benefits and challenges of most applied agile practices such as daily scrum meetings, sprint planning meetings, sprint review meetings, retrospective meetings, pair programming, short release and on-site customer. The most common benefits related to above identified agile practices are early problem identification, project visibility, increase communication, coordination and collaboration, trust, clarification of work and requirements, early client feedback and customer satisfaction. Similarly the most common challenges associated with above identified agile practices are lack of linguistic skills, culture differences and temporal differences. From survey result, it was found that the majority of benefits and challenges identified through literature review are prevalent in software industries to some extent. We were able to identify the benefits and challenges of agile practices such as daily scrum, sprint planning meetings, sprint review, retrospective meetings and short release. The most common benefits of above identified agile practices highlighted by survey participants are project visibility, early problem identification, increase coordination, opportunity for knowledge sharing and transferring, immediate feedback from client, and opportunity for understanding the task properly. Similarly the most common challenges identified by survey participants are language problems, temporal difference and difficult to explain and understand problems or issues over communication technologies. However, there are certain challenges like trust and culture issues, which have received most attention in the empirical literature, but are not identified by majority of industry respondents. Conclusions: From the information attained so far regarding the benefits and challenges of agile methods in offshore projects, we observed that there is an emerging trend of using agile methods in offshore projects and practitioners actually found it beneficial. The benefits of agile practices does not achieve straightaway there are certain challenging factors of GSD too, which can restrict the implementation or make the methodology not useful such as communication, coordination and collaboration. These challenges are usually occurred due to geographical separation, lack of trust and linguistic skills, culture difference etc. The presented work add contribution in a sense as to the best of our knowledge no systematic review effort has been done in this area with specifically focuses on highlighting the benefits and challenges. From survey results we found that majority of benefits and challenges highlighted by survey participants are to some extent same with what we have already studied in literature. However there are certain important challenges which have received most attention in empirical literature but were less identified by the survey participants like trust issue and culture difference. The benefits and challenges identified through industrial survey do not add much information into our attention. This does not mean that all possible benefits and challenges of applying agile methods in offshore project have been explored. The responses which were received from industry practitioners were quite few to make any kind of arguments. There is a probability that we missed the important benefits and challenges related to particular agile practices during our industrial survey. Therefore we conclude that a much thorough and inclusive answers should be required to identify the benefits and challenges of applying agile methods in offshore projects.

Global Software Development (GSD) is an emerging trend in today's software world in which teams are geographically dispersed, either in close proximity or globally. GSD provides certain advantages to development companies like low development cost, access to cheap and skilled labour etc. This type of development is noted as a more risky and challenging as compared to projects developed with teams under same roof. Inherently the nature of GSD projects are cooperative in which many software developers work on a common project, share information and coordinate activities. Coordination is a fundamental part of software development. GSD comprises different types of development systems i.e. insourcing, outsourcing, nearshoring, or farshoring, whatever the types of development systems selected by a company there exist the challenges to coordination. Therefore the knowledge of potential challenges, associated threats to coordination and practices to mitigate them plays a vital role for running a successful global project.