Distributed Software Development, management processes, globalization efforts, software development
As a result of globalization efforts, software development projects have been distributed geographically all over the globe, which characterizes Distributed Software Development (DSD). Global software development, a kind of DSN, is described by software development stakeholders who are globally distant. The companies adopting these strategies seek competitive advantage in form or quality, costs, and flexibility. Distributed Software Development is a more challenging project than in-house software development because methodologies and standards dedicated to these projects are still lacking. The researchers of this paper will analyze management model's problems associated with Distributed Software Development processes.
Distributed Software Development (DSD) has led organizations to make greater software development efforts in zones that offer them a higher competitive advantage, areas that have decentralized human resources at a cheaper cost. However, the distance that separates the development teams offer significant management disadvantages, these include communication and coordination. Software components are developed in different places, and this affects project control, project organization, and product quality. Therefore, new management processes and tools should be designed to enhance Distributed Software Development.
[...] Communication efficiency is crucial to the development and release of software products to the market. Distributed teams must handle their work in the perspective of completing user stories but not their role in adding features to the various components. According to the study by Heymans et al. (2011), four main factors affect the requirements communications that are standard views, scale, decision structures, and conventional views. The authors concluded that communication gaps result from quality issues, failure in meeting customer's expectations and causes wasted effort. [...]
[...] In the model, for the initiation phase, the change request is initiated from any of the distributed locations through any of the members. The change is take up in the “Change Request Form and is mostly raised by the client. The proposed framework offers a multilingual support to favor the client who is not familiar with the regular language. The change request form has information about the required change, which has the complete details of the request maker and the complete change request details. After completing the Change Request Form the form is submitted and recorded in the RCM Database for processing. [...]
[...] Process Management requires the selection of the correct development approach to solve issues such as lack of users' involvement, poor quality and new technology risks, lack of users' knowledge of application, incorrect, missing and evolving requirements. The software development process is a primary success factor in the distributed projects. New technology and unclear requirements render the waterfall model inappropriate for global developing strategic systems. The iterative model works correctly in the distributed environment and can solve some of the problems associated with distribution. [...]
[...] Finally, the experts approved that the RCM_GSD reduced to the minimum the number of face to face communication, two remained neutral. The authors finally documented the limitations of the proposed framework as the need to improve the decision phase of the RCM to improve the structure using the decision-making perspective (Minhas & Zulfiqar, 2014). Distributed Software Development has been integrated with Agile in the bid to reduce the time take to the market and save on the production costs. Use of agile practices has gained momentum in many organizations as they seek to increase performance and quality of their projects. [...]
[...] A message is produced and distributed to all the Change Control Board (CCB) stakeholders. After receipt of the notification, members vote and their votes are processed, either in agreement or against the change for implementation. The feedback from the voting process is used to determine the decision to be implemented (Khan, Basri, Dominic and Amin, 2012). If all the distributed members agreed on the evaluation results, change is approved to be implemented but if contrary, the change is rejected. The CCB final results are documented in the RCM database and all the distributed sites notified about the result. [...]
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