Software Project Management Approaches for Global Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) is a well established field of software engineering with the benefits of a global environment. Software Project Management (SPM) plays a key role in the success of GSD. As a result, the need has arisen to study and evaluate the downsides of SPM for GSD, to thereby pave the way for the development of new methods, techniques, and tools with which to tackle them. This paper aims to identify and classify research on SPM approaches for GSD that are available in the literature, to identify their current weaknesses and strengths, and to analyze their applications in industry. We performed a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) based on six classification criteria. Eighty-four papers were selected and analyzed. The results indicate that interest in SPM for GSD has been increasing since 2006. As a class of approaches, the most frequently reported methods (40%) are those used for coordination, planning, and monitoring, along with estimation techniques that can be used to better match a distributed project. SPM for GSD requires further investigation by researchers and practitioners, particularly with respect to cost and time estimations. These findings will help overcome the challenges that must to be considered in future SPM research for GSD, especially regarding collaboration and time-zone differences.

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (publisher-id): TST

Title: Tsinghua Science and Technology

Publisher: Tsinghua University Press (Xueyan Building, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China )

ISSN (Print): 1007-0214

Publication date (Print): 05 December 2018

Volume: 23

Issue: 6

Pages: 690-714

Affiliations

[1]∙ Manal El Bajta and Ali Idri are with Software Project Management Research Team, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes (ENSIAS), Mohammed V University, Rabat 713, Morocco.

[2]∙ Joaquín Nicolás Ros, José Luis Fernández-Alemán, Juan Manuel Carrillo de Gea, and Ambrosio Toval are with Department of Informatica y Sistemas, University of Murcia, Murcia 30100, Spain. E-mail: jnr@ 123456um.es ; aleman@ 123456um.es ; jmcdg1@ 123456gmail.com ; atoval@ 123456um.es .

[3]∙ Félix García is with ALARCOS Research Group Department of Information Systems and Technologies, University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Ciudad Real 13071, Spain. E-mail: Felix.Garcia@ 123456uclm.es .

Author notes

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: manal.elbajta@ 123456gmail.com

E-mail: ali.idri@ 123456um5.ac.ma .

Manal El Bajta is a PhD scholar at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco. She received the MS degree from National School of the Mineral Industry, Rabat, Morocco, in 2012. Her research interests include software engineering, software project management, and global software development.

Ali Idri received the DEA and MS degrees from Mohammed V University of Rabat in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He received the PhD degree from University of Quebec at Montreal in 2003. He is a professor at the Computer Science and Systems Analysis School, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes (ENSIAS), Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco. He serves as a member of the program committee of major international journals and conferences. His research interests include software effort/cost estimation, software metrics, software quality, computational intelligence in software engineering, data mining, and e-health. He is the author of more than 90 papers published in several international journals and conferences.

Joaquín Nicolás Ros received the BS and PhD degrees from the University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain, in 1994 and 2009, respectively. He is an associate professor with the Department of Informatics and Systems, University of Murcia. He is the author of more than 30 articles published in JCR journals and international conferences (e.g., IEEE Software, Information and Software Technology, Computer Science and Information Systems, Journal of Software: Evolution and Process). Currently, his main research interest is requirements engineering, global software development, and usability and sustainable processes.

José Luis Fernández-Alemán received the BS and PhD degrees from University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain, in 1994 and 2002, respectively. He is currently an associate professor with University of Murcia, where he is a member of the Software Engineering Research Group. He has published more than 50 JCR papers in the areas of software engineering and requirements engineering and their application to the fields of e-health and e-learning. Currently, his main research interest is m-health and m-learning and their application to computer science, medicine, and nursing.

Juan Manuel Carrillo de Gea received the BS, MS, and PhD degrees from University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain, in 2000, 2009, and 2016, respectively. He is a research associate and adjunct professor at University of Murcia, Spain. His current research interests include requirements engineering, requirements reuse, global software development, and empirical software engineering. He is also involved in other research lines, principally e-health and e-learning.

Félix García received the MS and PhD degrees from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Information Technologies and Systems at UCLM. He is a member of the Alarcos Research Group and his research interests include business process management, software processes, software measurement, and agile methods.

Ambrosio Toval received the BS degree from University Complutense of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, in 1983, and PhD degree from Technical University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain, in 1994. He is currently a full professor with University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain, where he is the head of the Software Engineering Research Group. He has conducted a variety of research and technology transfer projects in the areas of requirements engineering processes and tools, privacy and security requirements, and sustainable requirements, and applications in the e-health, e-learning, and mobile development domains. He has published in the same topics in international journals, such as IEEE Software, Information and Software Technology, Requirements Engineering, Computer Standards & Interfaces, IET Software, International Journal of Information Security, etc.