How Can Agile Practices Minimize Global Software Development Co-ordination Challenges ?

Project stakeholder distribution in Global Software Development (GSD) projects causes significant project communication, coordination and collaboration challenges. There is a growing interest in applying agile practices in GSD projects in order to leverage the advantages of both approaches; in some cases, GSD project managers use agile practices to reduce project distribution challenges. We use an existing coordination framework to identify GSD coordination problems due to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance. An industry-based case study is used to describe, explore and explain how the use of agile practices reduces various challenges that impact GSD coordination. For example our case study findings reveal that the agile practice “Daily Scrum meetings” with distributed project stakeholder participation through video-conferencing helped to reduce challenges related to GSD coordination. We conclude with comments on future research.