Global Software Development and Agile Methods: A Case Study
Abstract
Global software development has gone from being a trend to becoming a part of business as usual in most large software organizations. While it was possible to survive without offshoring five years ago, today there hardly exists any IT company in Norway that has not offshored services or development to some degree. Agile software development is another topic that has gained substantial interest during the last decade. Embracing changes, encouraging customer collaboration, short iterations and lighter documentation agile has become a buzzword for the IT industry. The interest for combining agile methodologies with global software development to leverage the advantages of both is increasing. Due to a limited body of empirical case studies reporting on the use of agile methods, and especially scrum, in the context of global software development further research has been suggested.In response to this a case study of the collaboration between onsite and offsite scrum teams in a multinational software company has been conducted. This paper examines what challenges are met by teams practicing scrum in global software development projects and what work processes and scrum practices are used in such an environment. A significant finding is that all teams try to keep the tasks done at one site as independent as possible from work done at the other site in order to reduce the communication need to a minimum.