Identifying the Factors that Influence Task Allocation in Global Software Development: Preliminary Results Sajjad Mahmood, Sajid Anwer, Mahmood Niazi, Mohammad Alshayeb Information and Computer Science Department King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia [smahmood, g201303950, mkniazi, alshayeb]@kfupm.edu.sa
Ita Richardson Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre Department of Computer Science and Information Systems University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
[email protected]
ABSTRACT Over the last decade, an increasing number of organizations have started software development in a globally distributed environment. One of the major challenges is that many organizations endorse the process of global software development without testing their management readiness for the globally distributed development activity. This includes work distribution through task allocation in the globally distributed development environment. The objective of this research paper is to identify factors that influence task allocation in global software development through carrying out a systematic literature review. We used customized search terms, derived from our research question, to identify literature on work distribution and task allocation in a global context. We identified criteria such as site technical expertise, time zone difference, resource cost, task dependency, vendor reliability, task size and vendor maturity level as key task allocation factors in globally distributed software projects. Based on the systematic literature review results, we suggest that there is a need to develop work distribution strategies and standards through global task allocation to help software development organizations in achieving the true potential of global software development at lower development costs and shorter time-to-market.
Categories and Subject Descriptors Software Engineering, Software Management
General Terms Experimentation, Measurement
Keywords Global software development; systematic literature review, task allocation, work distribution.
1. INTRODUCTION Software development methods and models have emerged from the development of traditional single-site to multi-site distributed Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by other than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from
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Global Software Development (GSD) environments [1]. In global software development, a client company may also contract out software development activities from another vendor company [2]. Many organizations started global software development to reduce software development cost. On the other hand, empirical studies also suggest that that half of the companies who have tried GSD failed. The failures lead to poor relationships between vendors and clients, misunderstanding of the projects’ scope, high costs and poor services [3, 4]. These failures can be attributed to two main reasons [5-7]: insufficient abilities like domain knowledge at the different sites and problems, due to cultural barriers, between the distributed sites. These issues are directly affected by the decisions taken at the task allocation phase in planning and managing GSD projects. Work allocation in traditional software development focusses on criteria such as cost rates, availability and expertise. Despite the importance of work distribution, little research has been carried out to understand task allocation processes at GSD organizations. Understanding issues relating to task allocation for GSD can contribute to more successful GSD projects and lead to a better relationships between distributed teams and between clients and vendors in distributed geographical locations. Our long term research goal is to develop a task allocation model to assist software organizations. We believe that identifying task allocation factors will assist global software development organizations in better understanding, planning and managing work distribution decisions in global projects. In this paper, through carrying out a systematic literature review, we identify factors which should be considered for GSD task allocation, thus enhancing work distribution decisions. The reminder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the background. The research methodology is outlined in Section 3. In Section 4, we present and discuss the initial results. Section 5 discusses the limitation of our study. Finally, the conclusion is presented in Section 6.
2. BACKGROUND GSD is the process where a company either has its software developed by geographically distributed teams or contracts all or part of its software development activities in return for remuneration [8]. GSD has become popular for a number of economic and technical drivers [9, 10] which is likely to further accelerate the growth of globally distributed projects. For example,
client organizations benefit from GSD because vendor organizations in developing countries typically cost significantly less than onshore development organizations [11-13]. Offshore vendor organizations generally improve their service quality with experience of GSD projects [14]. Furthermore, it has been noted that offshore outsourcing vendor organizations can add significant value to their clients’ business and revenue [15].
POPLULATION: Global software development organizations. INTERVENTION: Task allocation criteria. OUTCOME OF RELEVANCE: Criteria and factors in work distribution of GSD projects. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: Systematic literature reviews, empirical studies and expert options.
However, the geographical distance, time-zone and cultural differences associated with GSD have introduced a number of risks for globally distributed software development teams, such as breakdown of coordination mechanisms, loss of communication and issues in distribution of information between sites [16-18]. In addition to these risks, there are other challenges in GSD such as requirements discovery, time zone problems, lack of trust, impact of fear [19] and task allocation [20]. The focus of this paper is on an important issue of task allocation in GSD. In a tertiary mapping study, Verner et al. [21] investigated SLRs in GSD and identified twenty four SLRs conducted in the area of GSD. However, the results show that no SLR has been conducted on identifying the factors and criteria that influence task allocation process in GSD. We believe that the results of this study will fill this gap by providing the list of factors that influence task allocation process involving globally distributed teams.
3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) [22] is a technique to identify, analyze and interpret relevant published primary studies with reference to a specific research question. An SLR provides a summary of reported evidence available for a given area of interest. Systematic reviews differ from ordinary literature surveys in that they are formally planned and methodically executed. SLRs are recommended as a review methodology [22] because they allow the researchers to systematically summarize existing evidence from literature, identify research gaps and provide a framework to position future research activities. An SLR protocol consists of five main phases, as shown in Figure 1. In the first phase of our study, a research question was formulated as follows: RQ: What are the criteria that influence task allocation decisions in globally distributed projects?
Figure 1. SLR Major Process Phases. We validated our search terms in major academic databases in a scoping study. The following search terms show potential relevance to the research question as follows:
GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: Global software development OR Global Software Engineering OR Distributed Software Engineering OR Global software teams OR Multisite software development OR GSE; TASK ALLOCATION: Task Allocation OR Work Distribution OR Software Development Management; CRITERIA: Criteria OR Criterion OR Factor OR Determinants.
In the second phase, we constructed the search strategy in line with our research question and performed the search for relevant publications. Next, the identified relevant publications were scrutinized to ensure their relevance. In the fourth phase, the selected studies were evaluated based on the quality assessment criteria. Finally, data was extracted from selected studies for further analysis and assessment.
The relevant studies retrieved through the initial search string were used as a guide for the development and validation of the final search string. In the scoping study, we used some relevant publications which we had previously identified to cross check the validity of the search terms. A broad search was conducted between July 2014 and October 2014 to identify relevant articles published (or available on-line) up to October 2014.
3.1 Search Strategy
3.2 Publication Selection
The search strategy for the SLR is based on the steps as follows:
The following inclusion criteria were used:
Derive the search terms from population, intervention and outcomes. Identify alternative spellings and synonyms for major terms. Use Boolean ‘OR’ and ‘AND’ operators. Verify the derived search term in major academic repositories
We constructed the following search terms based on our search strategy:
Publications after 1995. Papers focus on answering our research question. Papers published in English.
We applied the exclusion criteria as follows:
Papers that are not published in English. Papers with no link with the research question. Grey publications, that is, papers without bibliographic information.
In the case of duplicate papers, first paper published / most complete version published.
Next, each paper was evaluated against the quality assessment criteria shown in Table 1. Each quality assessment criterion has two answers: ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ with scores of ‘1’ and ‘0’ respectively. The sum of the quality criteria resulted in the quality score for a particular paper. In this study, we only consider publications with a quality score greater than 3 (i.e. > 75%). As a result, 38 papers were finally selected which met the inclusion and quality assessment criteria. Table 1. Quality assessment Quality Criteria Are the aims of the research clearly stated in the paper? Is the technique well- presented and justified? Is the empirical design appropriate and applied adequately?
Score
Notes Yes =1 No =0 Yes =1 No =0 Yes =1 No =0 Yes =1 No =0
Is the paper well referenced?
Initially, when synthesising the data, data was extracted from the final selection of papers as follows: type of study, research methodology, data analysis, organization size and factors associated with task allocations in globally distributed software development projects. Table 2. Search execution Resource IEEE Xplore ACM Science Direct Springer John Wiley Total
Total Results 778 73 349 621 38 1866
Initial Selection 164 22 35 44 13 278
Final Selection 16 1 3 15 3 38
4. INITIAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The total number of results retrieved using the search terms in the electronic databases are shown in Table 2. After the initial round of screening by reading the title and abstract, two hundred and seventy eight studies belonging to different electronic research databases were selected. After full text readings in the second screening and quality assessment, 38 primary studies were finally selected. Table 3 presents the selected articles from the systematic review, sorted by year of publication. Appendix A presents the primary studies in the review. To answer the research question, the data was carefully extracted and synthesized from the 38 finally selected studies. We have identified a list of eleven criteria that influence task allocation process in global software development, as shown in Table 4. In our study, the most highly cited criterion for task allocation in GSD projects is ‘site technical expertise’ (68%). The development sites are spread across geographical boundaries; hence, selecting sites with appropriate domain expertise and knowledge is crucial to the success of a GSD project. For example, the interview of GSD project managers [23] revealed that matching specific technical
skill sets available at a vendor site is an important criteria for task allocation. Table 3. Articles selected from the systematic review Year 1999 2001 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Ref. [A38] [A37] [A7,A14,A29] [A24,A33] [A20, A26, A34] [A3, A4, A6, A16, A19, A21, A28] [A1, A2, A13, A18, A23, A30] [A10, A17, A22, A31, A35, A36] [A8, A11, A12, A15, A32] [A5,A9, A27] [25]
The second highest frequently mentioned criterion is ‘time zone difference’ (63%). GSD project managers typically use ‘time zone difference’ to their advantage by either allocating tasks based on ‘time-zone band’ or ‘follow-the-sun’ model. In ‘time-zone bands’ model, tasks are allocated in such a way that allows for synchronous communication. On the other hand, the ‘follow-thesun’ model facilitates the reduction of development time by assigning tasks to different time zones. Table 4. List of Factors that Influence GSD Factors Site technical expertise Time zone difference Resource cost Task dependency Vendor reliability Task size Vendor maturity level Local government regulations Requirements Stability Product architecture Intellectual property ownership
Freq. (n=38) 26 24 18 17 14 11 8 5 3 3 1
% 68 63 47 44 36 29 21 13 7 7 2
‘Resource cost’ is another key criterion (reported by 47% of the articles selected from the SLR) for work distribution in a GSD project. In general, researchers and practitioners report that resource cost consideration is an important factor during development of globally distributed projects. Typically, project managers aim to assign work units to low labor cost sites. On the other hand, GSD practitioners have also highlighted that cost alone should not be used as a sole criterion for task allocation because highly coupled tasks assigned to different sites potentially contribute to increase in communication and project execution costs. Hence, more than 44 % of the articles mentioned ‘task dependency’ as an important criterion for work distribution decisions in globally distributed projects. Fourteen out of thirty eight articles stated that ‘vendor reliability’ in terms of respective past experience provides an important insight during the task allocation process of a GSD project. The researchers have cited that the perceived reliability of a particular vendor helps clients to better manage task allocation risks in global teams.
Other key factors in work distribution through task allocation in GSD teams are ‘task size’ and ‘vendor maturity level’. They have been depicted in our study where 29 % and 21 % of the articles have mentioned them as task allocation criteria in GSD projects, respectively. Furthermore, less frequently mentioned factors are ‘local government regulations’, ‘requirements stability’, ‘product architecture’ and ‘intellectual property ownership’.
5. STUDY LIMITATIONS One of the main limitations of our study is the incompleteness. Our results depend on the used keywords and the limitations of the used search engines. In order to limit the risk of incompleteness in keywords lists, we used alternative spellings and synonyms to build the search terms. We also used five different electronic databases to reduce inherent limitations of existing search engines. Another important issue is the increasing number of research papers published on this topic. Hence, some recent and relevant publications could have been missed during the consolidation of our SLR study results. Nevertheless, we believe that our preliminary results cover the most relevant published literature.
6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK GSD has become a popular software development approach due to different benefits such as reduced development costs, access to a larger talent pool and follow-the-sun development. As GSD is expanding, we were motivated to identify task allocation criteria used in GSD projects. Through this SLR, we identified eleven factors of task allocation in GSD. The top ranked factors are: ‘site technical expertise’, ‘time zone difference’, ‘resource cost’, ‘task dependency’, ‘vendor reliability’, ‘task size’ and ‘vendor maturity level’. Based on our results, we suggest that there is a need to develop task allocation strategies and standards in order to address criteria associated with this task. The next phase of this research involves conducting an empirical study with the software industry (similar to [24-26]) to validate our findings and to provide a set of best practices, which can be used to address these factors. Another interesting area for future work is to analyse the importance of individual factors that influence task allocation in GSD project. We believe the results of this project will assist GSD organizations in better understanding, planning and managing task allocation decisions in global software development projects.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) for its continuous support of research. This research is supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research at KFUPM under research grant IN131013. Dr. Ita Richardson acknowledges the support provided by Lero – the Irish Software Engineering Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.
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Appendix A: LIST OF ARTICLES SELECTED IN SLR A1: A. Lamersdorf and J. Münch, "A multi-criteria distribution model for global software development projects," Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, vol. 16, pp. 97-115, 2010. A2: A. Lamersdorf and J. Münch, "Model-based task allocation in distributed software development," in Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development, ed: Springer, pp. 37-53, 2010. A3: A. Lamersdorf, J. Münch, and D. Rombach, "A decision model for supporting task allocation processes in global software development," in Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, ed: Springer, pp. 332-346, 2009. A4: J. Münch and A. Lamersdorf, "Systematic task allocation evaluation in distributed software development," in 2009 Workshop on the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems (OTM 2009), pp. 228-237, 2009.
A5: S. Vathsavayi, O. Sievi-Korte, K. Koskimies, and K. Systä, "Planning Global Software Development Projects Using Genetic Algorithms," in Search Based Software Engineering, ed: Springer, pp. 269-274, 2013. A6: A. Lamersdorf and J. Munch, "TAMRI: a tool for supporting task distribution in global software development projects," in 4th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering, (ICGSE 2009), pp. 322-327, 2009. A7: P. Jalote and G. Jain, "Assigning tasks in a 24-h software development model," Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 79, pp. 904-911, 2006. A8: A. Lamersdorf, J. Münch, A. F. Viso Torre, C. R. Sánchez, M. Heinz, and D. Rombach, "A rule‐based model for customized risk identification and evaluation of task assignment alternatives in distributed software development projects," Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, vol. 24, pp. 661-675, 2012. A9: D. Wickramaarachchi and R. Lai, "A method for work distribution in Global Software Development," in 3rd IEEE International Conference on Advance Computing Conference (IACC 2013), pp. 1443-1448, 2013. A10: A. Lamersdorf, J. Munch, A. Fernández-del Viso Torre, and C. Rebate Sanchez, "A risk-driven model for work allocation in global software development projects," in 6th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2011), pp. 15-24, 2011. A11: J. Fernandez and M. Basavaraju, "Task allocation model in globally distributed software projects using genetic algorithms," in 7th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2012), pp. 181-181, 2012. A12: S. Imtiaz, "Architectural task allocation in distributed environment: a traceability perspective," in 34th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 1515-1518, 2012. A13: A. Lamersdorf, J. Munch, A. F.-d. V. Torre, C. R. Sánchez, and D. Rombach, "Estimating the effort overhead in global software development," in 5th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2010), pp. 267-276, 2010. A14: D. K. Mak and P. Kruchten, "Task coordination in an agile distributed software development environment," in Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering, (CCECE'06), pp. 606-611, 2006. A15: N. C. Narendra, K. Ponnalagu, N. Zhou, and W. M. Gifford, "Towards a Formal Model for Optimal Task-Site Allocation and Effort Estimation in Global Software Development," in 2012 Annual SRII Global Conference (SRII 2012), pp. 470-477, 2012. A16: M. Cataldo and S. Nambiar, "Quality in global software development projects: A closer look at the role of distribution," in 4th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2009), pp. 163-172, 2009. A17: M. Ruano-Mayoral, R. Colomo-Palacios, J. M. FernándezGonzález, and Á. García-Crespo, "Towards a framework for work package allocation for GSD," in 2011 Workshop on the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems (OTM 2011), pp. 200-207, 2011. A18: T. A. B. Pereira, V. S. dos Santos, B. L. Ribeiro, and G. Elias, "A recommendation framework for allocating global software teams in software product line projects," in 2nd International Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Software Engineering, pp. 36-40, 2010. A19: Y. Ye, K. Nakakoji, and Y. Yamamoto, "Measuring and monitoring task couplings of developers and development sites in global software development," in Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development, ed: Springer, pp. 181-195, 2009. A20: H. Hu, B. Xu, Y. Ling, X. Yang, Z. He, and A. Ma, "Microestimation Based Global Collaborative Task Arrangement in
Distributed Software Design," in Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design IV, ed: Springer, pp. 64-75, 2008. A21: S. Doma, L. Gottschalk, T. Uehara, and J. Liu, "Resource allocation optimization for GSD projects," in Computational Science and Its Applications–ICCSA 2009, ed: Springer, pp. 1328, 2009. A22: N. Celik, S. Lee, E. Mazhari, Y.-J. Son, R. Lemaire, and K. G. Provan, "Simulation-based workforce assignment in a multiorganizational social network for alliance-based software development," Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, vol. 19, pp. 2169-2188, 2011. A23: S. Abufardeh and K. Magel, "The impact of global software cultural and linguistic aspects on Global Software Development process (GSD): Issues and challenges," in 4th International Conference on New Trends in Information Science and Service Science (NISS 2010), pp. 133-138, 2010. A24: S. o. Setamanit, W. Wakeland, and D. Raffo, "Using simulation to evaluate global software development task allocation strategies," Software Process: Improvement and Practice, vol. 12, pp. 491-503, 2007. A25: M. Ruano‐Mayoral, C. Casado‐Lumbreras, H. Garbarino‐ Alberti, and S. Misra, "Methodological framework for the allocation of work packages in global software development," Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, vol. 26, pp. 476-487, 2014. A26: A. Lamersdorf, J. Munch, and D. Rombach, "Towards a multi-criteria development distribution model: An analysis of existing task distribution approaches," in IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2008), pp. 109-118, 2008. A27: A. B. Marques, J. R. Carvalho, R. Rodrigues, T. Conte, R. Prikladnicki, and S. Marczak, "An Ontology for Task Allocation to Teams in Distributed Software Development," in 8th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2013), pp. 21-30, 2013. A28: A. Lamersdorf, J. Munch, and D. Rombach, "A survey on the state of the practice in distributed software development: Criteria
for task allocation," in 4th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2009), pp. 41-50, 2009. A29: S.-o. Setamanit, W. Wakeland, and D. Raffo, "Exploring the impact of task allocation strategies for global software development using simulation," in Software Process Change, ed: Springer, pp. 274-285, 2006. A30: I. Richardson, V. Casey, J. Burton, and F. McCaffery, "Global software engineering: A software process approach," in Collaborative Software Engineering, ed: Springer, pp. 35-56, 2010. A31: A. Gupta, I. Crk, and R. Bondade, "Leveraging temporal and spatial separations with the 24-hour knowledge factory paradigm," Information Systems Frontiers, vol. 13, pp. 397-405, 2011. A32: M. Yilmaz and R. V. O’Connor, “A market based approach for resolving resource constrained task allocation problems in a software development process”: Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 301, Springer, pp. 25-36, 2012. A33: D. K. Mak and P. B. Kruchten, "NextMove: A framework for distributed task coordination," in 18th Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2007), pp. 399-408, 2007. A34: A. Barcus and G. Montibeller, "Supporting the allocation of software development work in distributed teams with multi-criteria decision analysis," Omega, vol. 36, pp. 464-475, 2008. A35: J. Helming, H. Arndt, Z. Hodaie, M. Koegel, and N. Narayan, "Automatic assignment of work items," in Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering, ed: Springer, pp. 236-250, 2011. A36: S. Deshpande, S. Beecham, and I. Richardson, "Global Software Development Coordination Strategies-A Vendor Perspective," in New Studies in Global IT and Business Service Outsourcing, ed: Springer, pp. 153-174, 2011. A37: R. D. Battin, R. Crocker, J. Kreidler, and K. Subramanian, "Leveraging resources in global software development," Software, IEEE, vol. 18, pp. 70-77, 2001. A38: S. Goldman, J. Munch and H. Holz, “A meta-model for distributed software development”, in proceedings 8th IEEE International Workshop of Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprise, pp. 48-53,1999.
