Using global pairs for reducing software development time

  • Authors:

  • Pankaj Jalote;Arvind Gupta

  • Affiliations:

  • Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi;SAP Labs India Pvt Ltd, Gurgaon

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

With globalization, many software corporations have engineering groups working in different time zones. While a globally distributed team with engineers in different time-zones has been leveraged successfully in maintenance for reducing response time, not much work has been done on reducing the time in a development project, and globally distributed teams are mostly used to provide capacity benefit. We propose the use of global-pairs as a simple method of organizing global resources for leveraging time zone differences for reducing the cycle time. Instead of assigning tasks to individual resources, a project can assign tasks to global-pairs, each having one resource working in one time zone and the other in opposite time zone. Each global-pair is self-organizing and divides the work in a manner such that work within a task progresses continuously, thereby reducing the time to complete the assigned task by up to a half. Use of global pairs does not unduly complicate project management -- a key difficulty in global software development -- as a project looks same as before, except that some of the resources now "work faster". Initial experiment with a global pair in the coding phase of a live project suggests that the concept is feasible and can reduce the cycle time significantly.