Geographical Distance and Communication Challenges in Global Software Development: A Review

Due to innumerous advantages the Global software engineering is trending now a days in software development industry. Basic drivers for this trend are flexibility, faster development and expected cost saving. Software development has moved from traditional development to the global software development (GSD). Global software development is very important and ordinary practice in the software industry. In GSD, the developers are distributed across different sites and different countries, and lots of problems arise due to the physical social and cultural barriers. Global Software development is facing a number of challenges including Geographical distance, Communication and collaboration, time, culture, trust, tasks distribution, requirements gathering and collaboration. In this paper, authors conducted a detailed study on geographical distances and communication challenges in GSD, their inter dependencies, and also the proposed solutions and guidelines to address these challenges that are very critical in the success of GSD projects. Also in this paper a detailed literature review is provided, combined results are summarized and on the basis of these studies, a comparative study is made. This research will be helpful for other researchers to draw new strategies to tackle these challenges.

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