Tools and Techniques for Multi-site Software Development

Business reasons are increasingly causing software development projects to be distributed across the globe. However, software development tools and techniques in use today largely ignore the needs of distributed software development. At IBM India Research Lab, we have been looking at global software development practices to understand problem areas and propose solutions that could be of help. In the first part of this talk, I will chalk out a broad agenda for research in software engineering in aid of multi-site software development. The areas that we will consider are requirements management, application knowledge management, project dashboarding, and software quality assurance. I will touch upon various research efforts at IBM Research and elsewhere in these areas.

In the second part of the talk, I will describe our recent work in multi-site requirements management. Among the many challenges that arise in multi-site development, precise communication and management of requirements appears to be of immense importance. This particular challenge arises in the need for collaboration between the analysts and the systems engineers in mapping business requirements to system requirements, for communication between systems engineers and testers to create test cases for requirements, for coordination between the customer, analyst, developers and testers during requirement changes, and so on. Remoteness and time-zone differences strain each part of this scenario, leading to excessive re-work, delays and cost escalations. We are building a tool for multi-site requirements management. The salient features of this tool include views into the requirements and traceability information, synchronous as well as asynchronous communication facilities integrated in the views to enable in context communication; assisted change management; search on persisted communication and change logs; and visual clues to provide a heightened sense of awareness, indicating which stakeholders are online, which artifacts have pending notifications, current discussions etc.

This talk is based on joint work with Bikram Sengupta and Vibha S. Sinha of IBM India Research Lab.