Towards Identifying the Factors for Project Management Success in Global Software Development: Initial Results

Global Software Development (GSD) is a collaborative development where one company (client) contracts out all or part of its software development activities to another company (vendor), which provides services in return for remuneration. In today's world of high cost commitments and limited budgets, GSD provides a viable option for developing lower cost product with a relatively better quality. However, this comes at the cost of overcoming various challenges of managing a project, which is geographically distributed. The objective of this paper is to identify a set of factors that contributes to the success of project management in GSD. We have performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) by applying customized search strings derived from our research question. We have identified success factors, such as organizational structure, project managers' skills, communication, requirement specification, cultural awareness, and trust building. Our ultimate aim is to develop a model in order to measure organizations' project management readiness for GSD activities.