Top

Software Quality Journal

Published in:

01-12-2015

Handover of managerial responsibilities in global software development: a case study of source code evolution and quality

Authors: Ronald Jabangwe, Jürgen Börstler, Kai Petersen

Published in: Software Quality Journal | Issue 4/2015

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

Studies report on the negative effect on quality in global software development (GSD) due to communication and coordination-related challenges. However, empirical studies reporting on the magnitude of the effect are scarce. This paper presents findings from an embedded explanatory case study on the change in quality over time, across multiple releases, for products that were developed in a GSD setting. The GSD setting involved periods of distributed development between geographically dispersed sites as well as a handover of project management responsibilities between the involved sites. Investigations were performed on two medium-sized products from a company that is part of a large multinational corporation. Quality is investigated quantitatively using defect data and measures that quantify two source code properties, size and complexity. Observations were triangulated with subjective views from company representatives. There were no observable indications that the distribution of work or handover of project management responsibilities had an impact on quality on both products. Among the product-, process- and people-related success factors, we identified well-designed product architectures, early handover planning and support from the sending site to the receiving site after the handover and skilled employees at the involved sites. Overall, these results can be useful input for decision-makers who are considering distributing development work between globally dispersed sites or handing over project management responsibilities from one site to another. Moreover, our study shows that analyzing the evolution of size and complexity properties of a product’s source code can provide valuable information to support decision-making during similar projects. Finally, the strategy used by the company to relocate responsibilities can also be considered as an alternative for software transfers, which have been linked with a decline in efficiency, productivity and quality.

previous article In this issue

next article An experience-based framework for evaluating alignment of software quality goals

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

The tool can be downloaded from http://www.campwoodsw.com/sourcemonitor.html.

Detailed definitions of the measures can be found in the Source Code Monitor Tool that can be downloaded from http://www.campwoodsw.com/sourcemonitor.html.

Aspray, W., Mayadas, F., & Vardi, M. Y. (2006). Globalization and offshoring of software: A report of the ACM job migration task force. New York, USA.

Bansiya, J., & Davis, C. G. (2002). A hierarchical model for object-oriented design quality assessment. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 28(1), 4–17.CrossRef

Basili, V. R., Briand, L. C., & Melo, W. L. (1996). A validation of object-oriented design metrics as quality indicators. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 22(10), 751–761.CrossRef

Bird, C., Nagappan, N., Devanbu, P., Gall, H., & 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, pp. 85–93.

Briand, L., & Wüst, J. (2002). Empirical studies of quality models in object-oriented systems. Advances in computers, pp. 97–166.

Brooks, F. P, Jr. (1995). The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.). Boston, USA: Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing.

Cagnazzo, L., & Taticchi, P. (2009). Six sigma: A literature review analysis. In Proceedings of the international conference on e-activities and information security and privacy, pp. 29–34.

Carmel, E. (1999). Global software teams: Collaborating across borders and time zones. New Jersey, USA: Prentice Hall PTR.

Carmel, E., & Tjia, P. (2005). Offshoring information technology: Sourcing and outsourcing to a global workforce. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

Conchúir, E. O., Holmström, H., Ågerfalk, P. J., & Fitzgerald, B. (2006). Exploring the assumed benefits of global software development. In Proceedings of the 1st international conference on global software engineering, pp. 159–168.

Diehl, S. (2007). Software visualization—Visualizing the structure, behaviour, and evolution of software. Berlin: Springer.MATH

Griffith, T. L., & Sawyer, J. E. (2006). Supporting technologies and organizational practices for the transfer of knowledge in virtual environments. Group Decision and Negotiation, 15, 407–423.CrossRef

Herbsleb, J. D., & Grinter, R. E. (1999). Splitting the organization and integrating the code: Conway’s law revisited. In Proceedings of the 21st international conference on software engineering, pp. 85–95.

Herraiz, I., & Hassan, A. E. (2012). Making software—What really works, and why we believe it, chapter Beyond lines of code: Do we need more complexity metrics? pp. 125–141. O’Reilly Media.

Huckman, R. S., Staats, B. R., & Upton, D. M. (2009). Team familiarity, role experience, and performance: Evidence from Indian software services. Management Science, 55(1), 85–100.CrossRef

ISO/IEC/IEEE-24765. (2010). Systems and software engineering—Vocabulary. International organization for standardization.

Jabangwe, R., Börstler, J., Šmite, D., & Wohlin, C. (2013). Empirical evidence on the link between object-oriented measures and external quality attributes: A systematic literature review. Accepted for publication at Empirical software engineering.

Jabangwe, R., & Šmite, D. (2012). An exploratory study of software evolution and quality: Before, during and after a transfer. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE international conference on global software engineering, pp. 41–50.

Kanellopoulos, Y., Antonellis, P., Antoniou, D., Makris, C., Theodoridis, E., Tjortjis, C., et al. (2010). Code quality evaluation methodology using the ISO/IEC 9126 standard. International Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 1(3), 17–36.CrossRef

Lagerström, R., Würtemberg, L. M., Holm, H., & Luczak, O. (2012). Identifying factors affecting software development cost and productivity. Software Quality Control, 20(2), 395–417.CrossRef

Lehman, M. M. (1980). Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution. Proceedings of the IEEE, 68, 1060–1076.CrossRef

Lincke, R. d., Lundberg, J., & Löwe, W. (2008). Comparing software metrics tools. In Proceedings of the international symposium on software testing and analysis, pp. 131–142.

Lu, H., Zhou, Y., Xu, B., Leung, H., & Chen, L. (2012). The ability of object-oriented metrics to predict change-proneness: A meta-analysis. Empirical Software Engineering, 17, 200–242.CrossRef

Mens, T., & Demeyer, S. (2008). Software evolution. Berlin: Springer.MATHCrossRef

Mockus, A., & Weiss, D. M. (2001). Globalization by chunking: A quantitative approach. IEEE Software, 18, 30–37.CrossRef

Nagappan, N., Murphy, B., & Basili, V. (2008). The influence of organizational structure on software quality: An empirical case study. In Proceedings of the 30th international conference on software engineering, pp. 521–530.

Nidhra, S., Yanamadala, M., Afzal, W., & Torkar, R. (2013). Knowledge transfer challenges and mitigation strategies in global software development—A systematic literature review and industrial validation. International Journal of Information Management, 33(2), 333–355.CrossRef

Nurdiani, I., Jabangwe, R., Šmite, D., & Damian, D. (2011). Risk identification and risk mitigation instruments for global software development: Systematic review and survey results. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on global software engineering workshop, pp. 36–41.

Petersen, K., & Gencel, C. (2013). Worldviews, research methods, and their relationship to validity in empirical software engineering research. In Joint conference of the 23rd international workshop on software measurement and international conference on software process and product measurement, pp. 81–89.

Petersen, K., & Wohlin, C. (2009). Context in industrial software engineering research. In Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium on empirical software engineering and measurement, pp. 401–404.

Petersen, K., & Wohlin, C. (2010). Software process improvement through the lean measurement (SPI-LEAM) method. Journal of Systems and Software, 83(7), 1275–1287.CrossRef

Ramasubbu, N., & Balan, R. K. (2007). Globally distributed software development project performance: An empirical analysis. In European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on the foundations of software engineering, pp. 125–134.

Robson, C. (2011). Real world research (2nd ed.). West Sussex, UK: Wiley.

Runeson, P., Höst, M., Rainer, A., & Regnell, B. (2012). Case study research in software engineering. New Jersey, USA: Wiley.CrossRef

Singh, Y., Kaur, A., & Malhotra, R. (2009). Comparative analysis of regression and machine learning methods for predicting fault proneness models. International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 35(2), 183–193.CrossRef

Singh, Y., Kaur, A., & Malhotra, R. (2010). Empirical validation of object-oriented metrics for predicting fault proneness models. Software Quality Journal, 18(1), 3–35.CrossRef

Spinellis, D. (2006). Global software development in the freeBSD project. In P. Kruchten, Y. Hsieh, E. MacGregor, D. Moitra, & W. Strigel (Eds.), Proceedings of the international workshop on global software development for the practitioner, pp. 73–79.

Verner, J., Brereton, O., Kitchenham, B., Turner, M., & Niazi, M. (2012). Systematic literature reviews in global software development: A tertiary study. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on evaluation assessment in software engineering, pp. 2–11.

Šmite, D., & Wohlin, C. (2011). Strategies facilitating software product transfers. IEEE Software, 28(5), 60–66.CrossRef

Šmite, D., & Wohlin, C. (2012). Lessons learned from transferring software products to india. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 24(6), 605–623.

Šmite, D., Wohlin, C., Aurum, A., Jabangwe, R., & Numminen, E. (2013). Offshore insourcing in software development: Structuring the decision-making process. Journal of Systems and Software, 86(4), 1054–1067.CrossRef

Šmite, D., Wohlin, C., Feldt, R., & Gorschek, T. (2008). Reporting empirical research in global software engineering: A classification scheme. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on global software engineering, pp. 173–181.

Šmite, D., Wohlin, C., Gorschek, T., & Feldt, R. (2010). Empirical evidence in global software engineering: A systematic review. Empirical Software Engineering, 15(1), 91–118.CrossRef

Wieringa, R. (2013). Case study research in information systems engineering: How to generalize, how not to generalize, and how not to generalize too much. In 25th International conference on advanced information systems engineering, CAiSE, pp. xii–xii.

Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., Höst, M., Ohlsson, M. C., Regnell, B., & Wesslén, A. (2012). Experimentation in software engineering: An introduction. Berlin: Springer.CrossRef

Wohlin, C., & Šmite, D. (2012). Classification of software transfers. In Proceedings of the 19th Asia-Pacific software engineering conference, Vol. 1, pp. 828–837.

Title: Handover of managerial responsibilities in global software development: a case study of source code evolution and quality
Authors: Ronald Jabangwe
Jürgen Börstler
Kai Petersen
Publication date: 01-12-2015
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Software Quality Journal / Issue 4/2015
Print ISSN: 0963-9314
Electronic ISSN: 1573-1367
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-014-9247-1

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Other articles of this Issue 4/2015

In this issue

Software quality construction in 11 companies: an empirical study using the grounded theory

Empirical analysis of factors affecting confirmation bias levels of software engineers

A framework and tool to manage Cloud Computing service quality

Spoiled patterns: how to extend the GoF

An experience-based framework for evaluating alignment of software quality goals

Premium Partner