Globally distributed software teams are widespread throughout industry. But finding reliable methods that can properly assess a team's activities is a real challenge. Methods such as surveys and manual coding of activities are too time consuming and are often unreliable. Recent advances in information retrieval and linguistics, however, suggest that automated and/or semi-automated text classification algorithms could be an effective way of finding differences in the communication patterns among individuals and groups. Communication among group members is frequent and generates a significant amount of data. Thus having a web-based tool that can automatically analyze the communication patterns among global software teams could lead to a better understanding of group performance. The goal of this thesis, therefore, is to compare automatic and semi-automatic measures of communication and evaluate their effectiveness in classifying different types of group activities that occur within a global software development project. In order to achieve this goal, we developed a web-based component that can be used to help clean and classify communication activities. The component was then used to compare different automated text classification techniques on various group activities to determine their effectiveness in correctly classifying data from a global software development team project.

The increasing technological advancement and globalization has seen a rise in offshoring of IT-development, also known as Global Software Development (GSD). One of the most common countries for offshoring has been India with its increasingly competent population.The use of GSD to leverage highly skilled and low-cost labor also creates challenges in three main categories; Coordination, Control and Communication. These challenges arise due to socio-cul-tural, geographical and temporal distances.The use of the Scrum development framework is claimed by scholars to mitigate these issues. This study is grounded on Hossain, Bannerman & Jeffery’s (2011) research framework, which summa-rizes the current body of literature on Scrum’s mitigating effect on commonly occurring challenges in a GSD environment. Due to the scarcity of empirical data on the research framework, the authors of this thesis conducted an ethnographical study on location in India at Indpro, a company founded in Sweden and studied two projects. The purpose of this study is to both evaluate and provide suggestions for expansion of the Hossain et al. (2011) framework with ethnographically collected empirical support, which prior to this was primarily based on experience reports. This study also aims to identify GSD challenges and mitigation strategies that occur in the setting of an experi-enced organization conversant with Scrum methodology in a GSD context.The purpose of this study is to contribute to an increased empirical understanding of how Scrum is being used in a GSD environment, what challenges are prevalent in a distributed GSD environ-ment and how those challenges might be addressed or mitigated. In this study, parts of Hossain et al. (2011) framework are evaluated and suggestions for expanding it through mitigation strategies such as Planning, high quality ICT-Mediate Synchronous and asynchronous communication are specified. Implications for practitioners include the proposal to follow Scrum Practices more me-ticulously to receive all of Scrums inherent mitigating effects.

Background: Organizations want to reach shorter development cycles to stay competitive, meanwhile, many organization wants to globalize their business to obtain benefits like reduced cost, get hold of specific talent or gain global presence.  Typically in software development projects, there is a gap between development and operation resulting in a longer development cycle due to inferior communication and collaboration. DevOps is a framework that intends to reduce this gap with the purpose to reach shorter development cycles. However, currently, there is a lack of literature covering whether it is possible to adopt DevOps and keeping an offshore strategy.  Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to increase understanding about the use of DevOps in offshore projects. This increased understanding will be the start of filling the current gap in the literature about DevOps in distributed setups and form a basis for future research. The study aims to suggest how DevOps framework can bridge the gap between development and operation in offshore projects.  Method: An exploratory case study was conducted and three different offshore projects, who had adopted DevOps, were investigated. In this study, 15 members from different projects were interviewed to find out how DevOps had been adopted in their projects. Based on a survey, a Social Network Analysis was conducted for each project with the purpose to identify communication patterns between members.  Results: The result of this study provided information, specific to each project, about the setup, DevOps definition, and goal, DevOps practices as well as benefits and challenges with DevOps. Furthermore, the result presented information related to the performance of the project and, information about the collaboration, communication, and trust within the project.  Conclusion: This study presented four possible distribution possibilities of DevOps in an offshore project and suggested different ways to manage the work roles when adopting DevOps. The study indicates that DevOps can be adopted in an offshore project in order to decrease the gap between development and operation by considering three perspectives; roles and responsibility, automated workflow and DevOps practices, and knowledge sharing  Delimitations: This study is limited to only investigate projects from one company. Furthermore, the scope of this study does not include any economic aspects.

Context. Industry is moving from co-located form of development to a distributed development in order to achieve different benefits such as cost reduction, access to skillful labor and around the clock working etc. This transfer requires industry to face different challenges such as communication, coordination and monitoring problems. Risk of project failure can be increased, if industry does not address these problems. This thesis is about providing the solutions of these problems in term of effective roles and responsibilities that may have positive impact on GSD team. Objectives. In this study we have developed framework for suggesting roles and responsibilities for GSD team. This framework consists of problems and casual dependencies between them which are related to team’s ineffectiveness, then suggestions in terms of roles and responsibilities have been presented in order to have an effective team in GSD. This framework, further, has been validated in industry through a survey that determines which are the effective roles and responsibilities in GSD. Methods. We have two research methods in this study 1) systematic literature review and 2) survey. Complete protocol for planning, conducting and reporting the review as well as survey has been described in their respective sections in this thesis. A systematic review is used to develop the framework whereas survey is used for framework validation. We have done static validation of framework. Results. Through SLR, we have identified 30 problems, 33 chains of problems. We have identified 4 different roles and 40 different responsibilities to address these chains of problems. During the validation of the framework, we have validated the links between suggested roles and responsibilities and chains of problems. Addition to this, through survey, we have identified 20 suggestions that represents strong positive impact on chains of problems in GSD in relation to team’s effectiveness. Conclusions. We conclude that implementation of effective roles and responsibilities in GSD team to avoid different problems require considerable attention from researchers and practitioners which can guarantee team’s effectiveness. Implementation of proper roles and responsibilities has been mentioned as one of the successful strategies for increasing team’s effectiveness in the literature, but which particular roles and responsibilities should be implemented still need to be addressed. We also conclude that there must be basic responsibilities associated with any particular role. Moreover, we conclude that there is a need for further development and empirical validation of different frameworks for suggesting roles and responsibilities in full scale industry trials.

Context: There is an overwhelming prevalence of companies developing software in global software development (GSD) contexts. The existing body of knowledge, however, falls short of providing comprehensive empirical evidence on the implication of GSD contexts on software quality for evolving software systems. Therefore there is limited evidence to support practitioners that need to make informed decisions about ongoing or future GSD projects. Objective: This thesis work seeks to explore changes in quality, as well as to gather confounding factors that influence quality, for software systems that evolve in GSD contexts. Method: The research work in this thesis includes empirical work that was performed through exploratory case studies. This involved analysis of quantitative data consisting of defects as an indicator for quality, and measures that capture software evolution, and qualitative data from company documentations, interviews, focus group meetings, and questionnaires. An extensive literature review was also performed to gather information that was used to support the empirical investigations. Results: Offshoring software development work, to a location that has employees with limited or no prior experience with the software product, as observed in software transfers, can have a negative impact on quality. Engaging in long periods of distributed development with an offshore site and eventually handing over all responsibilities to the offshore site can be an alternative to software transfers. This approach can alleviate a negative effect on quality. Finally, the studies highlight the importance of taking into account the GSD context when investigating quality for software that is developed in globally distributed environments. This helps with making valid inferences about the development settings in GSD projects in relation to quality. Conclusion: The empirical work presented in this thesis can be useful input for practitioners that are planning to develop software in globally distributed environments. For example, the insights on confounding factors or mitigation practices that are linked to quality in the empirical studies can be used as input to support decision-making processes when planning similar GSD projects. Consequently, lessons learned from the empirical investigations were used to formulate a method, GSD-QuID, for investigating quality using defects for evolving systems. The method is expected to help researchers avoid making incorrect inferences about the implications of GSD contexts on quality for evolving software systems, when using defects as a quality indicator. This in turn will benefit practitioners that need the information to make informed decisions for software that is developed in similar circumstances.

<p>Global software development has been a phenomenon of growing interest for almost past decade or so; and its adoption trend continues to gain momentum. Globally distributed work istaken up as an alternative to single-site mainly because of the economic and strategic benefits itoffers. Software development at geographically distributed environment is not a straightforwardtask and entails numerous challenges which are unique to this form of development.</p><p>Requirements change management is considered challenging even in the best of conditions andit becomes even harder when performed at geographically distributed development locations.There is no existing model for managing requirements change in globally distributed softwaredevelopment context.</p><p>This study uses qualitative research method to explore requirements change managementprocess and investigates the underlying causes of requirements change in geographicallydistributed software development. The research work proposes a model for requirementschange management for global software development. This model tries to incorporate the roles,activities and artifacts identified in the change management models.</p>

The extensive use of global teams to develop software has prompted researchers to investigate various factors that can enhance a team’s performance. While a significant body of research exists on global software teams, previous research has not fully explored the interrelationships and collective impact of various factors on team performance. This study explored a model that added the characteristics of a team’s culture, ability, communication frequencies, response rates, and linguistic categories to a central framework of team performance. Data was collected from two student software development projects that occurred between teams located in the United States, Panama, and Turkey. The data was obtained through online surveys and recorded postings of team activities that occurred throughout the global software development projects. Partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) was chosen as the analytic technique to test the model and identify the most influential factors. Individual factors associated with response rates and linguistic characteristics proved to significantly affect a team’s activity related to grade on the project, group cohesion, and the number of messages received and sent. Moreover, an examination of possible latent homogeneous segments in the model supported the existence of differences among groups based on leadership style. Teams with assigned leaders tended to have stronger relationships between linguistic characteristics and team performance factors, while teams with emergent leaders had stronger. Relationships between response rates and team performance factors. The contributions in this dissertation are three fold. 1) Novel analysis techniques using PLS-PM and clustering, 2) Use of new, quantifiable variables in analyzing team activity, 3) Identification of plausible causal indicators for team performance and analysis of the same.

Global software development has been a phenomenon of growing interest for almost past decade or so; and its adoption trend continues to gain momentum. Globally distributed work istaken up as an alternative to single-site mainly because of the economic and strategic benefits itoffers. Software development at geographically distributed environment is not a straightforwardtask and entails numerous challenges which are unique to this form of development. Requirements change management is considered challenging even in the best of conditions andit becomes even harder when performed at geographically distributed development locations.There is no existing model for managing requirements change in globally distributed softwaredevelopment context. This study uses qualitative research method to explore requirements change managementprocess and investigates the underlying causes of requirements change in geographicallydistributed software development. The research work proposes a model for requirementschange management for global software development. This model tries to incorporate the roles,activities and artifacts identified in the change management models.

Global Software Development (GSD) is based on a geographical distance where teams are spread throughout the world. The related research have for a long time addressed the challenges presented by geographical distances. GSD is basically a necessity for many businesses to use in order to reduce development costs, reduce production time and to maintain high quality. The study aims to investigate the relationship between the reality of a specific maintenance project. Thus, our research question: How do distributed maintenance teams experience temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances? To achieve the purpose of the study, we chose to perform a case study of a global consulting company which recently started a new system maintenance project. The data collection was done through interviews and observations at the premises of the consulting company. We have confirmed the previous research and come up with our own contributions to the field. The findings of our thesis provides aspects of communication, coordination and control related to the three distances stated in our research question. A new collective term has also emerged, off-shore blackboxing.

Context: In this thesis we considered Knowledge Transfer (KT) in Global Software Development (GSD) from both the state of art and state of practice, in order to identify what are the challenges that hamper the success of KT in global software teams, as well as to find out what are the mitigation strategies that can be practiced to overcome these challenges. Objectives: The main objective of this research is to find an in-depth understanding of knowledge transfer challenges and mitigation strategies from both literature studies and industrial experienced employees. It also identifies the similarities and differences of challenges and strategies from literature studies and industrial experienced employees. The overall aim of this work is to provide a list of mitigation strategies to challenges, as guidelines to enable successful knowledge transfer in GSD. Methods: In order to fulfill the aim of the research, we collected the data through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and industrial interviews. Through SLR we found 35 articles relevant to our objectives. The data is extracted from those articles and conclusions are drawn. The relevant data is collected from databases such as Engineering village, ACM Digital Library, Science Direct, Wiley Inter Science, Scopus, ISI Web of Science and IEEE Xplore. We conducted 8 interviews from 8 different multinational companies. For analyzing the data we used grounded theory and qualitative comparative analysis. Results: In total, 72 different challenges and 107 mitigation strategies were identified from both SLR and interview results. In most of the studies, KT challenges in GSD are categorized into 3Cs (Communication, Control and Coordination). We also came up with a different view known as 2PT which conceptualizes the KT challenges and strategies into Personnel, Project and Technology factors. Conclusions: In future, researchers have to focus on the personnel, project and technology factors for implementing an effective KT process. From a practitioner‘s view, the results can be used to identify critical factors for effective KT. The challenges to KT show to what extent these results can be industrially applicable. / Srinivas Nidhra S/O Nidhra. Bikshamaiah H No:8-3-230/C/40, Plot No:351, Yousufguda, Venkatagiri, Hyderabad, Pin:500045 Andhra Pradesh, India. phone: 04023545378 Muralidhar, S/O Y. Rama Rao, Prasad leboratories, Jaggampeta, Andhra Pradesh, India, pin: 533435 phone: +919885995887