Benefits of global software development: the known and unknown

  • Authors:

  • Pär J. Ågerfalk;Brian Fitzgerald;Helena Holmström Olsson;Eoin Ó Conchúir

  • Affiliations:

  • Lero, The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland and Uppsala University, Sweden;Lero, The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland;Lero, The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland and IT University, Gothenburg, Sweden;Lero, The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • ICSP'08 Proceedings of the Software process, 2008 international conference on Making globally distributed software development a success story
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Organizations are increasingly moving to the global software development(GSD) model because of significant benefits that can accrue. However,GSD is fraught with difficulties arising from geographical, temporal and sociocultural distances. The emphasis in the literature to date has typically been onhow to overcome these significant challenges associated with GSD. While anumber of GSD benefits have been identified in the literature, there are also anumber of less obvious, what we term 'unknown, ' potential benefits that canaccrue from GSD. Here we synthesize and integrate an overall set of potentialGSD benefits and categorize them according to the organizational, team andprocess level to which they are most applicable. The 'unknown' includes organizationbenefits, such as improved resource allocation, team benefits, suchas reduced coordination cost and improved team autonomy, and process benefits,such as improved documentation and clearly defined processes.