Software Engineering

Software Team and Global Software

Development , Five distances of GSD,
Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEF) &
Organizational Process Assets (OPA)

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A Global Software Team/ Engineer…

Developers
Usability Internatio

Design Tes nalization

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Content Cross-
PM platform

Sales Product
BD Evangelism
Marketing
A Global Software Team/ Engineer…

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Motivation – what is GSD?
Globally distributed development, in particular from a project management
perspective, is considerably more challenging than even the most complex
project managed entirely in house
Motivation – Who is doing GSD?

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Motivation – Why to do GSD? (1)

Cost!

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Motivation – Why to do GSD? (2)

Productivity
• Faster and better services
• Head count reduction
• Scalability
• Leverage business
and technology expertise

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Motivation – Why to do GSD? (4)

Strategic movement
• To access the global talent pool
• Focus on core business area
• Risk sharing
• Proximity to market

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Motivation – Why to do GSD? (5)

Why is global distributed development?

• To save development cost
• To reduce development cost
• To reduce the time to market
• To access the global talent pool
• Focus on core business area
• Business and technology expertise
• Faster and better services
• Risk sharing
• Scalability

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Five distances of GSD
Geography

Organization Timezone

Work
Cutural
process

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Five distances (1) – Geography

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Five distances (2) – Timezone

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Five distances (3) – Cultural
• Cultural is blueprint for action
• A cultural group can be understood through the groups’
rituals, customs and values
• Cutural blindness occurs when we don’t accept or
perceive other’s behaviors that are guided by their
culture

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Five distances (3) – Cultural

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Five distances (4) – Work process

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Five distances (4) – Work process

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Five distances (5) – Organization

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Five distances (5) – Organization
• Distances in regulations, goals, objectives between
organizations
• Boundaries provide control – efficiency are derived from
this control

Tea Department Company

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Impediment (cause) – Coordination
• Lack of trust
• Lack of team identity/ team awareness
• Delay in communication and coordination
• Difficulty in finding relevant expertise/ Coordination requirement
• Difficulty in organizing task
• Limited choice of communication mean
• Misinterpretation of tasks
• Extra coordination due to mismatches in goals, perceived value
• Extra coordination due to mismatches in organizational structure
• Extra coordination due to different local management policy
• Complicated communication and coordination paths
• Difficulty in identifying role and responsibility

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Supporting GSD
• Architectural modularity
– Design team structure according to product architecture
• Location
• Role
• Authority
• Communication channel
• Social media
– Informal communication mechanism
– Sense of belonging to a community
– Awareness of other’s presence
– Encourage curiosity and knowledge seeking

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Supporting GSD
• Team building
• Temporal collocation
• Frequent/ Continuous Delivery and Feedback
• Version control system
• Distributed
• Centralized

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Organizational Process Assets
 Every Organization maintains a repository of information
and data from the past Projects that can be used by the
Organization’s people and projects, and these are called
Organizational Process Assets (OPA). Organizational
process assets can be divided into two categories.
 Organizational process assets influence the project’s
success, and they keep growing as the organization
becomes larger.
Organizational Process Assets
a) The first is for processes, policies and procedures for
conducting work, which include the following:
• Policies
• Procedures
• Standard templates
• General guidelines
b) The second category comprises the corporate knowledge
base for storing and retrieving information. For example:
• Risk register
• Lessons learned
• Stakeholder register
• Past project files
• Historical information
Enterprise Environmental Factors
 Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEF) are any or all
environmental factors either internal or external to the
Project that can influence the Project’s success.
External enterprise Internal enterprise
environmental factors: environmental factors:
• Government regulations • Organizational culture
• Weather • Type of organizational
• Market conditions structure
• External political conditions • Internal political
• Industry standards conditions
• Legal restrictions • Available resources
which are usually out of one’s • Infrastructure
control