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Abstract
Global Software Development (GSD) is a major trend in software development, with many claimed benefits arising from utilization of low-cost expertise in other countries. However, GSD is characterized by temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances, which create challenges for communication, coordination and control.
Scrum is a time-boxed, iterative, incremental Agile software development management method that offers benefits of responsiveness to requirements changes, extensive stakeholder collaboration, and early and frequent delivery of product outputs. While originally designed on the premise of close interaction between developers (which is usually only found in collocated projects), Scrum is increasingly being applied in GSD to leverage the benefits of both and mitigate the challenges of GSD.
However, little empirical research is published on how Scrum practices mitigate GSD challenges. This dissertation contributes to this gap, first, by developing a research framework from prescriptions found in a Systematic Literature Review (drawn mainly from industrial experience reports) on the mechanisms by which Scrum practices mitigate GSD communication, coordination and control challenges. It then validates the prescriptions for the coordination challenges (limited to contain the scope of the study), using qualitative case study analysis, against four industrial cases of GSD projects using Scrum practices.
Overall, the study seeks to develop an understanding of the research question: How do Scrum practices mitigate GSD challenges?
The study finds that Scrum practices offer no distinctive advantage in mitigating the effects of temporal distance on coordination in GSD projects, but they do make a distinctive contribution in mitigating geographical and socio-cultural distance-based GSD coordination challenges.
The practice-based findings support the literature-based prescriptions on Scrum practice mitigation of GSD coordination challenges. However, the findings also indicate that the mitigation mechanisms used in practice are richer and broader than proposed by prior research. Based on the study, the research framework is revised and extended, contributing a reference framework to inform theory and practice, and propositions to carry forward for further future research and validation.