Jorge Luis Nicolas Audy

Abstract More than a decade ago, organizations seeking lower costs and access to skilled resources began to experiment with remotely located software development facilities. This change is having a profound impact not only on marketing and distribution but also on the way products are conceived, designed, constructed, tested, and delivered to customers. The number of organizations distributing their software development processes worldwide keeps increasing. As a result, software development is becoming a multi‐site, multicultural and globally distributed undertaking. More recently, attention has turned toward trying to understand the factors that enable multinationals and virtual corporations to operate successfully across geographic and cultural boundaries. On the basis of these factors, we present the lessons learned from case studies in two software development units from multinational organizations located in Brazil. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Distributed Software Development involves a number of different business models, and companies intending to embark on the journey of distributed development have difficulty choosing the model(s) that suits their process and current software practice. More literature that presents similarities as well as differences among these models, in terms of processes, practices and challenges that characterize them, is thus becoming critical to software practitioners. This paper intends to bring more knowledge in this direction. We present empirical evidence from a case study of DSD practice in five companies that had projects following one or more of the different DSD business models described in the literature. We discuss the similarities and differences in the challenges faced by the projects in these models, as well as the relationship between the models, development process, and project size and complexity, as reported in the projects studied.

The objective of this paper is to propose a typology for distributed software development comprising the relation between the three main stakeholders: project team (developers, analysts, managers, testers, system administrator, etc), customers and users. We propose a set of criteria to define geographically distributed environments. As a result, a model to define the distribution level for an organization in a Distributed Software Development (DSD) environment is presented. The model is applied to two exploratory case studies and its results discussed. These cases studies involve companies with headquarters in the United States and a development unit in Brazil. Advantages of this model as well as some aspects of the increasing distribution of software development particularly in a few Brazilian organizations are discussed.

Software configuration management is an important support activity in the software development process. In global environments, the software configuration becomes critical due to the characteristics of the distributed development (physical distance, cultural differences, trust, communication and other factors). The objective of this paper is to analyze the software configuration management in a global software development environment, identifying the main challenges. The results are based on a case study carried on at a multinational organization that has offshore software development centers in Brazil, India and Russia, and was recently recognized in the CMM Model level 2 in the Brazilian unit. The results suggest the necessity to adapt and implement some activities in the software configuration management process addressing the main existing challenges. These activities were identified as lessons learned, collected at the end of each project. The problems and the solutions adopted are presented, aiming to relate these solutions to the organization distribution level, considering the project team, users and customers.