A Survey on the State of the Practice in Distributed Software Development: Criteria for Task Allocation
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paper_title: Managing cross-cultural issues in global software outsourcing

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Exploring research-derived best practices for effective management of global software teams.
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paper_title: Tactical Approaches for Alleviating Distance inGlobal software Development

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To overcome the problem of distance in global software development, various managers are experimenting and quickly adjusting their tactical approaches. We discuss some emerging approaches and explain their motivations from conceptual and practical perspectives. The most intuitive approach for alleviating distance is to apply communication technologies, but this is not our focus. Rather, we examine tactics that go beyond communication technologies, tactics aimed at reducing intensive collaboration, national and organizational cultural differences, and temporal distance.
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paper_title: Global software development process research at Siemens

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Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) is the research and development unit of Siemens USA. The Software Engineering department of Siemens Corporate Research spends much of its time doing consulting for Siemens Business Units. As a result, we have been involved in a large number of software development projects varying in size, complexity, and domain. Many of these projects were developed with globally distributed teams. Over the years, we have identified best practices, and begun to organize these practices into more cohesive set of development processes focused on issues related to global development. This paper describes our experience with experimentation, lessons learned from one specific project, and suggests future steps for global software development (GSD) within Siemens.
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paper_title: The geography of coordination: dealing with distance in R&D work

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Geographically distributed development creates new questions about how to coordinate multi-site work. In this paper, we present four methods product development organizations used to coordinate their work: functional areas of expertise, product structure, process steps, and customization. We describe the benefits and difficulties with each model. Finally, we discuss two difficulties that occur irrespective of the model used: consequences of unequal distribution of project mass, and finding expertise.
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paper_title: EVALUATION CRITERIA FOR SELECTING OFFSHORING CANDIDATES: AN ANALYSIS OF PRACTICES IN GERMAN BUSINESSES

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The identification of suitable applications or projects is a main initial step in any software development or maintenance related IS offshoring arrangement. This paper examines evaluation criteria and their importance for selecting application or project candidates for offshoring. Based on a literature analysis and interviews with 47 experts from 36 different German companies describing 64 case examples, we find that in contrast to the literature, “size”, “codification”, and “language” are perceived as important selection criteria by experts. Case examples additionally show that “business specificity” seems to be a main reason for application or project failures, that “business criticality” appears to be less important than suggested by the literature, and that adequate “size” might be a necessary prerequisite, but seems not to be a sufficient criterion for an application’s or project’s suitability for offshoring. These differences in comparison to findings from the literature may be explained by cultural and language differences.
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paper_title: Developing an Inter-site Coordination Index for Global Software Development

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Globally distributed software development teams face extraordinary communication and coordination problems due to spatial, temporal, and cultural separation between team members. Using the dyadic model of coordination, the paper proposes a coordination index that encapsulates the coordination difficulties in global software development. The coordination index is derived from four other indices-coupling index, need index, effectiveness index, and time-zone index. While a discrete-event simulation model is used to determine the time-zone index for all possible temporal separations, two rounds of questionnaire surveys were administered among researchers and practitioners world-wide to determine the need and the effectiveness indices. The important factors affecting inter-site coordination were short-listed after the first round. In the second round, weights were assigned to the short-listed factors by making a pair-wise comparison between them. The paper also demonstrates how the coordination index, so derived, can be used for a few project planning decisions.
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paper_title: D.Raffo. Using simulation to evaluate global software development task allocation strategies

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We describe a hybrid computer simulation model of the software development process that is specifically architected to study alternative ways to configure global software development (GSD) projects, including phase-based, module-based, and follow-the-sun allocation strategies. The model is a hybrid system dynamics and discrete-event model. In this paper, test cases have been developed for each allocation strategy, and project duration is computed for each configuration under a range of plausible assumptions for key parameters. The primary finding is that although under ideal assumptions follow-the-sun is able to produce impressive reductions in time-to-market, under more realistic assumptions the reverse is true, thus corroborating findings by other researchers. We also conducted a factorial design to examine the impact of GSD factors including distance, culture, language, trust, and time zone on project duration under different task allocation strategies. The analysis reveals that different factors affected the performance of the selected allocation strategies in unique ways. These findings show how the unique ability of our GSD model to represent detailed development processes and work artifact transfer allows researchers to address challenging questions that are critical to GSD project success. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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paper_title: A Reference Model for Global Software Development: Findings from a Case Study

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The purpose of this paper is to present a reference model for global software development, based on the results found in a case study conducted in two software development units from multinational organizations located in Brazil. A preliminary description of this model was originally published in 2004. In this paper, we present the reference model in detail, improving the description and discussing the factors that enable multinationals corporations to operate successfully across geographic and cultural boundaries. At the end, we also discuss a preliminary evaluation of the reference model usage.
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paper_title: Research Methods in the Social Sciences

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With its clear presentation and integration of detailed real-world examples, the acclaimed "Research Methods in the Social Sciences "accessibly illustrates the relevance of social sciences research without sacrificing key content. The eighth edition includes engaging new studies and examples that explore the use of Twitter feeds in social sciences research, the effect of climate change on human conflict, the use of rational intuition in explaining the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion, and much more. The eighth edition also includes new and expanded coverage of conducting qualitative research, as well as conducting research in our digital age, including the use of the Internet and various computer software packages for retrieving, cleaning, coding, and analyzing "big data."
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paper_title: Distributed Software Development: Practices and challenges in different business strategies of offshoring and onshoring

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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.
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paper_title: REASONS FOR SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN OFFSHORE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

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This paper describes an in depth analysis of successful and unsuccessful offshore custom software development (CSD) projects. Offshore projects tend to be unsuccessful, because physical, time, cultural, organizational, and stakeholder distances negatively influence communication and knowledge exchange between onshore and offshore project team members. The success rate of 19 offshore CSD projects was characterized with regard to scope, quality, time, and costs, by interviewing onshore and offshore project managers. Unsuccessful projects had a complex organization and had team members who did not work together in previous projects. All reasons for success and failure were categorized and compared. A characteristic that successful projects had in common was the availability of informal mutual adjustment, which means facilitating the informal communication between the team members in the right way. A major characteristic that unsuccessful projects had in common was improper planning, which has a large influence on the team results in an offshore CSD project. The implementation of standards was neither mentioned by the successful projects as a major reason for success, nor by the unsuccessful projects as a major reason for failure. The paper advises that in order to be successful, a project manager of a new offshore CSD project should not spend too much attention to standards, but to planning and informal mutual adjustment.
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Title: A Survey on the State of the Practice in Distributed Software Development: Criteria for Task Allocation

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: Provide an overview of the importance of task allocation in global and distributed software development. Discuss the various criteria for task allocation and introduce the purpose and structure of the paper.

Section 2: RELATED WORK
Description 2: Summarize empirical studies and theoretical models relevant to task allocation practices in distributed development.

Section 3: THE QUALITATIVE STUDY
Description 3: Detail the terminology, goals, design, and execution of the qualitative study, including participant selection and interview methodology.

Section 4: RESULTS
Description 4: Present the findings of the study, including the company backgrounds, criteria for task allocation, and differences across types of distributed development.

Section 5: FURTHER FINDINGS
Description 5: Discuss any unexpected or additional insights that emerged during the interviews.

Section 6: LIMITATIONS
Description 6: Address the limitations of the study, including sample size, scope, and potential ambiguities.

Section 7: CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Description 7: Summarize the main conclusions of the study and suggest directions for future research on task allocation in distributed software development.

Section 8: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Description 8: Acknowledge the contributions of participants, advisors, and funding sources to the study.