Philips experiences in global distributed software development

Global software development is increasingly common. Main expected benefits are improvements in time-to-market efficiency and access to greater—and less costly—resources. A number of problems are still to be solved before the full potential of global development can be obtained. This paper describes the experience of over 10 years of global distributed development at Philips, derived from about 200 projects. We discuss the experience and lessons learnt from multi-site development. Main lessons learned are that explicit agreements and ways of working should be defined for the following areas needing the most attention; team coordination and communication, requirements and architectures, integration, and configuration management. In addition, we discuss the experience gained from subcontracting software development to suppliers. Main lesson learned from subcontracting software development is the need for explicit attention and ways of working with respect to selection of suppliers, specification of the work to be subcontracted and establishment and content of the contract.