Este trabalho apresenta um modelo para gestão de projetos distribuídos de software. Inicialmente, são apresentados os principais problemas identificados na literatura em relação ao Desenvolvimento Distribuído de Software. Em seguida, são analisados alguns modelos de gestão especializados neste tipo de desenvolvimento e também modelos tradicionais de gestão. Uma comparação entre os modelos é realizada para identificação do nível de atendimento de cada um em relação aos principais problemas identificados para este contexto de desenvolvimento. As melhores práticas de gestão em ambientes de Desenvolvimento Distribuído de Software são identificadas e utilizadas para compor um modelo de Gestão de Projetos Distribuídos de Software (GesProDS). O detalhamento do modelo envolve a descrição dos papéis, responsabilidades das organizações e recursos envolvidos. Além disso, a estrutura da organização envolvida e os processos de gestão identificados são descritos. / This work shows a model for management of Global Software Development projects. Initially the main problems identified in literature for this kind of projects are presented. After that, some specialized models of project management are discussed. A comparison between the identified models and the most known models of project management in relation to the main described problems for this context is also carried through. From the described information, the best practices of project management are identified and used to compose a project management model (GesProDS) for Global Software Development Projects. This model is described including its roles, responsibilities of organizations and required resources. Further more, the structure of the virtual organization and management processes are described.

Thesis in its theoretical part summarizes research in the area of global software development. Practical part illustrates processes in real firm which develops software in distributed environment. Conclusion then provides reccomendations to be applied in the real company.

Este trabalho apresenta um modelo para gestão de projetos distribuídos de software. Inicialmente, são apresentados os principais problemas identificados na literatura em relação ao Desenvolvimento Distribuído de Software. Em seguida, são analisados alguns modelos de gestão especializados neste tipo de desenvolvimento e também modelos tradicionais de gestão. Uma comparação entre os modelos é realizada para identificação do nível de atendimento de cada um em relação aos principais problemas identificados para este contexto de desenvolvimento. As melhores práticas de gestão em ambientes de Desenvolvimento Distribuído de Software são identificadas e utilizadas para compor um modelo de Gestão de Projetos Distribuídos de Software (GesProDS). O detalhamento do modelo envolve a descrição dos papéis, responsabilidades das organizações e recursos envolvidos. Além disso, a estrutura da organização envolvida e os processos de gestão identificados são descritos. / This work shows a model for management of Global Software Development projects. Initially the main problems identified in literature for this kind of projects are presented. After that, some specialized models of project management are discussed. A comparison between the identified models and the most known models of project management in relation to the main described problems for this context is also carried through. From the described information, the best practices of project management are identified and used to compose a project management model (GesProDS) for Global Software Development Projects. This model is described including its roles, responsibilities of organizations and required resources. Further more, the structure of the virtual organization and management processes are described.

Software is one of the core elements that drive the modern economy, with visible use in areas such as personal computing, telecommunications and banking, and background use in areas such as aircraft traffic management, nuclear power generation, and automotive control systems. Organizations that build software are unique in that they span industrial domains, and at their core of what they do is codifying human knowledge. When we talk about software organizations, we think of organizations that work in the three broad areas of shrink wrapped application software, software-intensive systems, or software services.  By shrink wrapped application software, we refer to the software that one can buy in a retail store for use on his or her computer. Software-intensive systems are part of a larger system such as air traffic management, and software services focus on making software work for other organizations. This thesis uses studies of eight software organizations to understand how these organizations are able to identify changes to their environment, and create the required capabilities to meet those changes – in other words, how these organizations gain enterprise agility. To understand enterprise agility, we ask three simple questions, namely how does the organization improve what it currently does? What does the organization do? and Who does the work that the organization chooses to do? By answering each of these questions in the context of software organizations, we identify the three mechanisms of Software Process Improvement (SPI), Creating Systems of Innovation (CSI), and Leveraging Globally Available Capabilities (LGAC). These three mechanisms are interconnected and interdependent. By creating rich descriptions of how these mechanisms are implemented in the organizations that we studied in the thesis, we are able to build confidence that these mechanisms are an accurate representation of the approaches that organizations use. In addition to identifying the mechanisms, by analyzing across the cases, we identify the four organizational enablers of stakeholder alignment, employee empowerment, group & organizational learning, and governance. Organizations can create enterprise agility by ensuring the presence of the four organizational enablers and leveraging some combination of the three mechanisms. While it is possible for the organization to create enterprise agility in the absence of these mechanisms, we believe that the agility generated is not sustainable. To survive in the tough economic conditions of today, software organizations need to be aware of, and actively manage both the enablers and the mechanisms for sustained success. This thesis is a first step in finding more effective ways to manage software organizations as a whole, rather than as a collection of individual projects. It presents a philosophy of thinking about software organizations that addresses the uniqueness of these organizations while at the same time leveraging best practices and thought leadership from the disciplines of software engineering, quality,  knowledge management, strategy, organizational theory, and stakeholder theory.

This study represents an attempt to address and discuss some of the most significant questions in the research on virtual software development work today. The research is held as a collective case study, including three cases with distinctive characteristics in both the software projects investigated and the types of collaborations. The study aims to reveal the success factors in virtual work, especially on the issues of communication, coordination and collaboration, by presenting the unfavorable experiences and major issues encountered in each case, as well as the favorable ones and lessons learned at the end of the development processes. The collective research focuses on both the global and non-global contexts. As a result, it points out the distinctive and opposite findings of the cases, and proposes discussions of those findings according to the properties of the development settings.

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.

Context. Global software development (GSD) gained huge recognition in today’s business world. Most of the software companies day by day are striving hard to evolve globally where software is developed in the context of different environmental settings that are distanced on various factors like geography, timezone, culture and language. Coordination is the factor that plays one of the prominent roles in such a setting for effective teamwork and project success. Although numerous efforts has been done in this research area, there has been no proper evidence from industry about the impact of these coordination challenges on the overall quality of the software when being developed in a distributed setting. Objectives. The purpose of this study is to examine and identify the coordination challenges and risks faced in global software development projects that has a negative impact on the quality of software from practitioner’s perspective. It also identify the tools, methods, and techniques that are used in industry to overcome these challenges and maintain quality standards. Methods. The aims and objectives of our study are fulfilled by conducting survey among practitioners working in GSD projects all around the globe. Further, 10 interviews are conducted with practitioners working in different companies and geographical locations in order to gain a detailed understanding of the impact of identified coordination challenges on the quality of software in GSD projects. Results. A total of 50 survey responses are recorded, out of which 48 respondents specify that coordination challenges has a negative impact on software quality in GSD context. By the ratings given by the participants, we identified the challenges and risks that had a major impact. Mixed results are obtained during interviews where most of them prioritized coordination as a major problem in GSD projects. It also included that use of some tools, methods and processes help them in overcoming this issue. The quality attributes that are mostly affected due to the challenges in GSD projects are also identified. Conclusions. After the analysis of survey results, the coordination challenges and associated risks in GSD projects are identified. They were found to havemostly negative impact on software quality. After thematic analysis of interview results, we observed that though the impact of coordination challenges is negative, its extent of implication is moderate in most cases.

Context. Global Software Development (GSD) is the plan of action in which software development is performed under temporal, political, organizational and cultural boundaries. Offshore outsourced software development is the part of GSD, which refers to the transfer of certain software development activities to an external organization in another country. The primary factors driving offshore outsourced software development are low cost, access to a large pool of skilled laborers, increased productivity, high quality, market access and short development cycle. Requirements engineering (RE) and especially requirements elicitation is highly affected by the geographical distribution and multitude of stakeholders. Objectives. The goal of conducting this study is to explore the challenges and solutions associated with requirements elicitation phase during offshore software projects, both in research literature and in industrial practice. Moreover, this study examines that which of the challenges and practices reported in literature can be seen in industrial practice. This helped in finding out the similarities and differences between the state of art and state of practice. Methods. Data collection process has been done through systematic literature review (SLR) and web survey. SLR has been conducted using guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters. During SLR, The studies have been identified from the most reliable and authentic databases such as Compendex, Inspec (Engineering village) and Scopus. In the 2nd phase, survey has been conducted with 391 practitioners from various organizations involved in GSD projects. In the 3rd phase, qualitative comparative analysis has been applied as an analysis method. Results. In total 10 challenges and 45 solutions have been identified from SLR and survey. Through SLR, 8 challenges and 22 solutions have been identified. While through industrial survey, 2 additional challenges and 23 additional solutions have been identified. By analyzing the frequency of challenges, the most compelling challenges are communication, control and socio-cultural issues. Conclusions. The comparison between theory and practice explored the most compelling challenges and their associated solutions. It is concluded that socio-cultural awareness and proper communication between client and supplier organization’s personnel is paramount for successful requirements elicitation. The scarcity of research literature in this area suggests that more work needs to be done to explore some strategies to mitigate the impact of additional 2 challenges revealed through survey. / 0046 707123094

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.

Global Software Development (GSD) team members engage in intellectual activities that involve sharing business domain knowledge and technical knowledge across geographical areas, which is crucial to the successful development of software. In global software development, media choice may influence how virtual teams create and share knowledge. As digital technology advances and organizations become more digitally transformed, current communication theories for media selection lack the explanation to the complicated phenomena with the use of advanced media technologies. There have been many studies focused on the effectiveness of media, but they did not include user’s understanding of system security and its influence on knowledge sharing behavior. However, affordance theory explains the utility with both social actors and technical features. The use of media may be shaped by features of technologies and user’s perception on system security. The goal of this study was to empirically assess the effects of media affordances and media security awareness on knowledge sharing behaviors among GSD team members with the lens of affordance theory. In this study, data was collected through survey from 214 GSD employees, after inviting 1000 employees to participate. The survey data was analyzed to test the effects of communication media affordance and user’s awareness of media security on behavior in knowledge sharing. The analysis results show that awareness of media security had significant moderating effects on the relationships from some actualized media affordances to implicit knowledge sharing. The results of this study revealed positive relationships between perceived media affordances and actualized media affordances. The results also showed that organization tenure had a significant effect on implicit knowledge sharing, and professional tenure had a significant effect on explicit and implicit knowledge behavior. This study contributed to the body of knowledge in organizational communication literature by providing new insights into how technology properties and users’ awareness on technology security shape team members’ knowledge sharing practice.