On the relationship between process maturity and geographic distribution: an empirical analysis of their impact on software quality

  • Authors:

  • Marcelo Cataldo;Sangeeth Nambiar

  • Affiliations:

  • Bosch Corporate Research, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, Bangalore, India

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

An extensive body of research has developed in the area of software processes improvement and maturity models. Despite being a quite influential body of work, little is known about how software process maturity models and improvement activities relate to a major trend in the software industry: geographic distribution of development activities. In this paper, we seek to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between software process maturity and geographic distribution. In particular, we studied their combined impact on software quality. Using data from a multi-national software development organization, our analyses revealed that process maturity and the multiple dimensions of distribution have a significant impact on the quality of software components. More importantly, our analyses showed that the benefits of increases in process maturity diminish as the development work becomes more distributed, a result that has major implications for future research work in the process and the global software engineering literature as well as important implications for practitioners.