Many organizations are moving towards Global Software Engineering and Global Development is becoming a major trend. Global Software Engineering comes with its own set of challenges that may affect projects in a negative way. However, it is still becoming increasingly popular among organizations because of its lure of cheap labour, portrayal of a global presence and a diverse talent/labour pool of resources that the organizations get to select from. The need for evaluating the processes of these global organizations has also grown and a number of Software Process frameworks are being designed and restructured to help cover the gap of evaluating these processes in a global environment. This thesis aims to examine one popular Software Process framework i.e. the ISO 9001:2000 TickIT. The authors provide informed recommendations of how and where the TickIT guide can incorporate various aspects of Global Software Engineering in its guidelines. The empirical validation of this research consisted of both interviews and surveys. The interviews were conducted with TickIT auditors working in the fields of Global Software Engineering and Software Process Improvement. These interviews provided insight into the minds of the people already working in the global software domain. The survey was in the form of an online questionnaire that was sent out to TickIT auditors from the United Kingdom and Sweden. Their replies were analyzed and the final informed recommendations for the TickIT guidelines were provided based on both the interview replies and the questionnaire analysis. / Many organizations are moving towards Global Software Engineering and Global Development is becoming a major trend. Global Software Engineering comes with its own set of challenges that may affect projects in a negative way. However, it is still becoming increasingly popular among organizations because of its lure of cheap labour, portrayal of a global presence and a diverse talent/labour pool of resources that the organizations get to select from. The need for evaluating the processes of these global organizations has also grown and a number of Software Process frameworks are being designed and restructured to help cover the gap of evaluating these processes in a global environment. This thesis aims to examine one popular Software Process framework i.e. the ISO 9001:2000 TickIT. The authors provide informed recommendations of how and where the TickIT guide can incorporate various aspects of Global Software Engineering in its guidelines. The empirical validation of this research consisted of both interviews and surveys. The interviews were conducted with TickIT auditors working in the fields of Global Software Engineering and Software Process Improvement. These interviews provided insight into the minds of the people already working in the global software domain. The survey was in the form of an online questionnaire that was sent out to TickIT auditors from the United Kingdom and Sweden. Their replies were analyzed and the final informed recommendations for the TickIT guidelines were provided based on both the interview replies and the questionnaire analysis. / Mobile: +46-73-5590649, +46-76-2509246

In today world, the software companies are expanded above the continents. The software development work span continents and the distributed team work together over the borders. The agile development methodology demands close collaboration with client, rapid requirements change and an iterative development of fixed length. When this way of agile approach is applied in a distributed project, it requires frequent communication and knowledge exchange among the dispersed team members and need collaboration with customer over distance. Besides the geographical, the linguistic and the different time zone barriers in a distributed project, the computer mediated tools suppose being useful media in connecting and to coordinating among dispersed colleague in a project. Though, these tools depict variant effectiveness in communication exchange, however, there efficient use connects peoples at the two sites. The aim of this thesis study is to explore the communication channel support to the Scrum practices in a distributed project. The purpose of the research is to analyse collaboration and communication in distributed teams working together through computer mediated technology. For this purpose, a company case is studied doing a distributed agile project. The author’s insight the communication and information exchange through the ICT in an agile project. Based on the case analysis, the authors suggest the recommendations for implementing and establishing agile practices in a distance project. / Mobil: +46700381303

Context: Over the past few years, Global Software Development (GSD) has emerged as an evolving trend in the software industry. The reasons behind this evolution are globalization, economic benefits, time to market, organizational and strategic location, access to skilled labor and reduction of costs. But despite its benefits, GSD also has challenges associated with communication, coordination and control. The challenges are mainly due to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances. Due to flexibility, and emphasis on frequent communication in agile methods, researchers have shown interest in incorporating agile methods in GSD. Extreme Programming (XP) is one of the most widely known agile methodologies that values simplicity, communication, courage and feedback. In this research study, we have investigated the suitability of XP in GSD by exploring its benefits and challenges in the state of art and state of practice. Objectives: This study aims at investigating the benefits and challenges associated with the combination of XP and GSD both in the research literature and in practice. The study also explores practices or solutions adopted in order to address the challenges of XP-GSD combination. Moreover, this study compares challenges of XP-GSD combination with the traditional GSD challenges. Methods: This research study has been accomplished with the help of a systematic literature review (SLR) and an industrial survey. For the systematic review, the snowballing approach was applied, and an initial set of papers was selected from IEEE Xplore and Google Scholar. After selecting the initial set of papers, backward snowballing was conducted by searching the reference list of the selected articles. Then, forward snowballing was conducted by looking for the citations of the selected articles. After completing the systematic review, the industrial survey was conducted to complement the findings of the literature review. The data collected from both SLR and survey was analyzed both separately and collectively. Results: Through SLR, we have identified 21 benefits, 17 challenges, and 18 solutions to the identified challenges. The benefits and challenges have been classified according to communication, coordination and control in correspondence with temporal, socio-cultural and geographical distance. From the survey, we have identified 19 benefits, 20 challenges, and 17 solutions to the identified challenges. However, 13 benefits, 9 challenges, and 8 solutions were in common. The majority of challenges found in both literature review and survey were however traditional GSD challenges. Conclusions: The scarcity of research literature in the area suggests that more work needs to be done to successfully implement XP in GSD projects. The benefits and challenges extracted from literature and industry suggest that the application of XP can be beneficial for GSD since the majority of the reported challenges are traditional GSD challenges. Nevertheless, application of XP practices can alleviate these challenges. Based on the results, we conclude that XP can be successfully adopted in GSD projects.

The main aim of this thesis is to explore the industrial practices of requirements negotiation and conflict resolution within distributed software development. The motivation for this study is to get insight of the industrial practices in particular interventions (Communication tools, Models, Communication media) that used by practitioners to resolve requirements negotiation and conflicts resolution between clients and suppliers, since many researchers purposed interventions in the literature for requirements negotiation and conflicts resolution in distributed software development. Context: In Requirements Engineering, requirements negotiation and conflict resolution are crucial activities to achieve a common ground between clients and suppliers, it is considered as one of the crucial factors for delivering successful software. However, the shift from traditional collocated practices to a distributed environment offers both benefits and drawbacks which were studied earlier by researcher, but surprisingly there are few studies with insight of exploring the distributed requirements negotiations and conflict resolution practices. This research investigates the state of requirements negotiation and conflict resolution activities in distributed software development with an insight on their importance and relevance to this research area. Objectives: Overall goal of this thesis is to understand how requirements negotiations and conflict resolution are performed in distributed software development, knowing what are the available tools to perform requirements negotiation and conflict resolution, whether these existing tools are good enough to cope up with the industrial practices, knowing most widely used tools, methods and approaches, most importantly does the present research able to bridge the gap with in distributed software development? Methods: This thesis study comprises of two research methodologies. 1. Systematic mapping study (SMS)- To identify the proposed interventions in the literature to perform requirements negotiation and conflict resolution activities in Industrial Software Development within a distributed environment. 2. Industrial Survey- To identify industrial practices to perform rei quirements negotiation and conflict resolution in Industrial Software Development within a distributed environment. Results: 20 studies were identified through systematic mapping study (SMS). After analyzing the obtained studies, the list of interventions (Preparatory activities/communication tools/ Models) were gathered and analyzed. Thereupon, an industrial survey is conducted from the obtained literature, which has obtained 41 responses. Effective communication media for preparatory activities in requirements negotiations and conflict resolution are identified, validation of communication tools for effective requirements negotiations and conflict resolution is performed. Apart from the validation, this study provided list of factors that affects the requirement negotiations and conflict resolution activities in distributed software development. Conclusions: To conclude, the obtained results from this study will benefit practitioner in capturing more insight towards the requirements negotiations and conflict resolution in distributed software engineering. This study identified the preparatory activities involved for effective communication to perform requirements negotiation activities, effective tools, models and factors affecting of requirements negotiations and conflict resolution. In addition to this, validation of results obtained from the literature is carried through survey. Practitioners can be benefitted from the end results of by knowing the effective requirements negotiation and conflict resolution interventions (Communicational tools/ Models/ Communication media) for early planning in distributed software development. Researchers can extend the study by looking in to the real-time approaches followed by the practitioners to perform the both activities in the direction of future studies.

Going offshore has become a norm in current software organizations due to several benefits like availability of competent people, cost, proximity to market and customers, time and so on. Despite the fact that Global Software Engineering (GSE) offers many benefits to software organizations but it has also created several challenges/issues for practitioners and researchers like culture, communication, co-ordination and collaboration, team building and so on. As Requirements Engineering (RE) is more human intensive activity and is one of the most challenging and important phase in software development. Therefore, RE becomes even more challenging when comes to GSE context because of culture, communication, coordination, collaboration and so on. Due to the fore mentioned GSE factors, requirements’ understanding has become a challenge for software organizations involved in GSE. Furthermore, Knowledge Management (KM) is considered to be the most important asset of an organization because it not only enables organizations to efficiently share and create knowledge but also helps in resolving culture, communication and co-ordination issues especially in GSE. The aim of this study is to present how KM practices helps globally dispersed software organizations in requirements understanding. For this purpose a thorough literature study is performed along with interviews in two industries with the intent to identify useful KM practices and challenges of requirements understanding in GSE. Then based on the analysis of identified challenges of requirements understanding in GSE both from literature review and industrial interviews, useful KM practices are shown and discussed to reduce requirements understanding issues faced in GSE.

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.

Context. Global Software Development (GSD) or Global Software Engineering (GSE) is defined as the plan of action in which the software development is performed under various boundaries, such as temporal, political, organizational and cultural [1,2] . The projects developed in globally distributed environment are containing more risks than projects developed in collocated environment because of different challenges such as temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances [67]. In this thesis communication risks have been discussed along with their causes and effects that hinder the effectiveness of GSD projects. Moreover mitigation practices to resolve communication risks and their negative impacts are also discussed. Objectives. The study describes the identification of communication risks, their causes, effects and the practices to mitigate the risks from both literature and industrial perspectives. Some recommendations has also been discussed on the basis of these resulted communication risks and their mitigation practices. Methods. Detailed systematic literature review in order to collect the data from relevant empirical studies with respect to our scope has been conducted in the first phase. Studies were selected from various Electronic Data Sources (EDS) such as IEEE Xplore (IEEE), ACM Digital Library (ACM), Inspec (IS), Compendex (CD), ISI Web of Science (WoS), Cite Seer (CS), Google Scholar (GS), Science Direct (SD), Springer Link (SL), Wiley Inter Science (WIS), and Business Source Premier (BSP). In second phase 22 industrial interviews were conducted from 13 different multinational organizations. In third phase data analysis has been made based on the analysis of ground theory. On the basis of the codes of grounded theory, comparative analysis has been performed between literature and industrial settings. At the end of the thesis some recommendations has been provided in order to resolve communication risks in GSD. Results. As a result of systematic literature review 44 risks, 44 causes, 38 effects and 63 practices have been identified in GSD with respect to communication. 27 risks, 22 causes, 19 effects and 39 mitigation practices were identified from the industrial interviews. These risks, causes, effects and practices are not only described in this thesis but also mapped in relation to each other. At the end in comparative analysis the combined risks, causes, effects and practices were identified in tabular form. In total 47 risks, 45 causes, 39 effects and 65 mitigation practices were identified through this work. Conclusions. Communication plays a fundamental role in achieving the best practices in Global Software Engineering. This study points out the salient risks and limitations that hamper the process of smooth communication in geographically dispersed teams. The causes and effects of the mentioned risks are discussed in detail and a set of recommendations is provided to cope with those risks and to minimize their effect. The resultant set of recommendations is based on the best suitable practices which shall be followed by globally distributed organizations to achieve a fully communicated environment just like an in-house development setting. / 0046760622684

Context: Software engineering researchers are guided by research principles to conduct any type of research. Though, there are many guidelines to detail how a particular research method can be applied, there is always a necessity to continue and to improve the existing empirical research strategies. The context of this thesis is to address guidelines for conducting controlled experiments in Global Software Engineering (GSE). With this thesis, the state-of-the-art of conducting experiments in GSE research has been explored. Objectives: The goal of this thesis is to analyze the existing experiments in GSE research. Research problems addressed with GSE experiments and the state-of-the-art of overall GSE experiment design need to be analyzed. Appropriate guidelines should be drawn in order to provide strategies to future GSE researchers in mitigating or solving GSE specific experimentation challenges. Methods: A systematic literature review (SLR) is conducted to review all the GSE experiments that are found in the literature. The search process was done on 6 databases. A specific search and quality assessment criterion is used to select these GSE experiments. Furthermore, scientific interviews are conducted with GSE research experts to evaluate a set of guidelines (thesis author’s recommendations) that address the challenges when conducting GSE experiments. Thematic analysis has been performed to analyze the evaluation results and to further improve or implement any suggestions given by the interviewees. Conclusions: The results obtained from the SLR have provided a chance to understand the state-of-the-art and to analyze the challenges or problems when conducting controlled experiments in GSE. The challenges that are identified in GSE controlled experiments are found to be with experiment study-setting, involving subjects and addressing GSE relevant threats to validity in a GSE experiments. 9 guidelines are framed, with each guideline addressing a specific challenge. The final guidelines (that resulted after interviews) provide effective recommendations to GSE researchers when conducting controlled experiments. / +919441308167

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.

Context: Software transfer is one of the approaches to globalize software development that prescribes transferring a software product from an original development site to another site. This approach is challenged by transferring knowledge from experienced people to inexperienced people. Therefore, the identified challenges and recommendations related to software transfer are vital to a successful software transfer project. Objectives: The main aim of this study is to identify recommendations for transferring software products for further maintenance from receiving site’s perspective. This is achieved by an in-depth understanding of the staged model for the software life cycle, the differences of software transfer type, how software transfers impact software evolvability, and the challenges at the receiving sites after transfers. Methods: In order to fulfill the aim and objectives of the research, the author of this thesis collected data through a literature review and conducted interviews with 10 developers, who were involved in software transfer projects in three different international companies – 6 developers from Alpha company, 3 developers from Beta company, and 1 developer from Gamma company. Through the literature review, the author of this thesis found 35 primary studies relevant to research objectives. For analyzing the data, the author of this thesis used Strauss and Corbin’s open coding and axial coding techniques. Results: In total, 15 challenges for the receiving sites in maintaining transferred software products were identified and placed in 8 categories. Three factors that trigger changes from one product maintenance stage to another were identified. 19 recommendations for planning to transfer a software product were derived from challenges and factors found. These challenges, factors, and recommendations are elaborated in this report. Conclusions: The results of this study both validate and extend current knowledge of software product transfer. There should be more empirical research performed on after transfer period of software product transfer to identify the challenges and recommendations associated with transferring software products. However, the results of this study should be beneficial for companies when transferring software products to remote sites within company. / This thesis investigates the challenges in transferring software product by collecting data through a literature review and conducted interviews with 10 developers, who were involved in software transfer projects in three different international companies and contributes with recommendations to overcome these challenges. The result of the research both validates and extends current knowledge of software product transfer.