As mentioned in an earlier post that there are four key challenges in offshore software development such as Trust, Socio-cultural, Communication and Coordination and Knowledge Transfer
In this blog we have addressed how these challenges effect the coding phase of software development.
Trust:
Insufficient social integration can degrade the performance, lower motivation and satisfaction of the developer. Resulting in creating mistrust between the client and the development team (Koehne et al., 2012).
Socio-Cultural:
Due to cultural differences, developers often misinterpretation each other, causing wrong requirements to be coded (Herbsleb et al., 2005).
Developers at remote sites, insufficient use version control systems due to different organisational cultural habits (Cataldo et al., 2007).
Developers belonging to higher economy countries usually do not help people belonging to low economy countries in fear of losing their jobs to them (Bird et al., 2009).
Communication and Coordination:
Usage of different process and disparity in process maturity at different sites can cause coordination problems (Bird et al., 2009; Herbsleb et al., 2005).
Staff members at new offshore sites have a tendency to not reply quickly to emails of onshore members (Herbsleb et al., 2005).
· Communicating all the details and norms of the process to be followed to remote teams is very time consuming (Mullick, et al., 2006).
Knowledge Transfer:
Difficulties in tracking information in distributed development (Herbsleb et al., 2005; Koehne et al., 2012).
Divergence in tools usage among different teams cause knowledge transfer problems (Bird et al., 2009)
Bird, C., Nagappan, N., Devanbu, P., Gall, H., and Murphy, B. (2009). Does distributed development affect software quality? An empirical case study of Windows Vista. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '09). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 518-528.
Cataldo, M., Bass, M., Herbsleb, J.D., Bass, L. (2007). On Coordination Mechanisms in Global Software Development. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE '07). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 71-80.
Herbsleb, James D., Audris Mockus, Thomas A. Finholt, and Rebecca E. Grinter (2001). "An empirical study of global software development: distance and speed." In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on software engineering, pp. 81-90. IEEE Computer Society, 2001.
Kausar, Maryam and Adil Al-Yasiri (2015).“Distributed Agile Patterns for Offshore Software Development” 12th International Joint Conference onComputer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE), IEEE 2015
Kausar, Maryam, and Adil Al-Yasiri. "Using Distributed Agile Patterns for Supporting the Requirements Engineering Process." In Requirements Engineering for Service and Cloud Computing, pp. 291-316. Springer, Cham, 2017.
Koehne, B., Shih, P.C., and Olson, J.S. (2012). Remote and alone: coping with being the remote member on the team. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1257-1266.
Mullick, N., Bass, M., Houda, Z., Paulish, P., and Cataldo, M. (2006). Siemens Global Studio Project: Experiences Adopting an Integrated GSD Infrastructure. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE '06). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 203-212.
