Managing Distributed Software Development with Performance Measures

The Distributed Software Development (DSD) has been increasingly adopted for providing advantages over traditional software development. But this approach presents some challenges such as communication difficulties, cultural differences among the involved and low proximity among developers. This paper presents a set of performance measures for management through five perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes and, learning and growth, based on Balanced Scorecard (BSC).The fifth perspective, geographical dispersion, has been proposed as an extension of the BSC System for DSD projects. The performance perspectives aim measure and to support the decision making process of stakeholders through metrics related to the attributes of quality, productivity, cost, time and geographic dispersion, fundamental in the software project management. So, the performance measures are a mechanism to evaluate the return on financial investment, the satisfaction of customers and employees, the performance of processes running on the DSD, the continuous improvement of the organization and the success of the geographical dispersion.