Distributed software development projects: work breakdown approaches to overcome key coordination challenges

• Authors: Sanjay Mohan;Jude Fernandez
• Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd India software engineering conference
• Year: 2010

Software Development projects face challenges even when the team is co-located. With distributed teams, these challenges are greater and the teams face numerous other challenges. The overall impact is an increase in the project risks. Consequently, the practice of project management faces multiple challenges too. Many research studies on distributed teams have discussed a number of these challenges and we have certainly observed many of them in practice. Researchers have identified that coordination related issues are among the key set of challenges faced by the distributed teams. In this paper, we present an analysis of the coordination challenges mainly from the perspective of the Flow Dependency. This is a type of coordination where an activity produces an output that serves as an input to another activity. The core aspect of our research centers on using effective work breakdown techniques. In addition, we also explore the use of suitable project management and collaboration tools as coordination aids. Based on the findings from our research, we propose a composite set of solutions to help software projects with team members distributed across locations. The expectation is that these solutions will assist the team in managing some of the challenges associated with distributed development. We also present case studies of some of our observations and experiences from the actual deployment of some of these solutions. The key benefits were streamlining of coordination among the distributed team members, reduction in the overall collaboration effort and reduction in project risks.