Special issue on global software engineering
Authors: A. Milewski; Alberto Avritzer; Y. Dubinsky
Year: 2012

Over the past 10 years, Global Software Engineering (GSE) and Development has traversed through several stages commonly experienced by new practices. Industry began the practice first as a way to manage development costs and then later with the hope that it could provide workforce flexibility and better allocation of expertise. Researchers began by categorizing different versions of the practice and exploring whether GSE could generally be successful or not. As the practice continued, successes and failures were studied to determine the conditions that led to each, and these results were melded with practical, Industry experience into guidelines for successful use. The utilization of GSE is now relatively mature, and the study of it has evolved into a more sophisticated and nuanced discipline. Although once, the big research question was: does GSE work?—the questions now are much more varied and utilize a much wider set of approaches and viewpoints. Moreover, current research sits atop and draws from a much larger history of established empirical findings. The seven papers in this Special Issue on GSE provide a good representation of the current state of GSE practice and research and demonstrate recent trends. Earlier and more abbreviated versions of these articles appeared in the 5th Annual International Conference on Global Software Engineering, held in Princeton, USA in August, 2010. As a discipline matures, it often finds important general principles by studying unique, specialpurpose instances; the unique instance can free the researcher for important insights that might seem too commonplace if discovered in the mainstream process. The paper by Smite and Wohlin entitled “Lessons Learned from Transferring Software Products to India” is a good example of this research methodology. The paper focuses on projects that begin in one country and then are moved to another, typically for reasons of cost and expertise-flexibility. However, from this specific practice comes a set of guidelines that apply to many aspects of GSE, for example, adjusting processes to people and transferring people to maintain work continuity. The paper by da Silva, Prikladnicki, França, Monteiro, Costa and Rocha entitled “An Evidencebased Model of Distributed Software Development Project Management: Results from a Systematic Mapping Study” demonstrates two recent methodological trends in GSE research. First, with a more substantial literature base from which to draw conclusions, GSE researchers can now analyze trends across whole groupings of studies. This paper provides a systematic and in-depth analytic review of 70 research papers in the field with an eye toward understanding the unique challenges faced by project managers in a distributed software development context as well as the tools and practices most often used to meet those challenges. A second current trend in GSE research has to do with the desire to generalize findings from individual studies into a broader conceptual model, and this paper attempts to model global project management by casting challenges, tools, and practices into a cause and effect relationships. These authors’ model proposes how the effectiveness of project management practices might be influenced by geographic, temporal, social, and personal distances through mediators, such as trust, cooperation, and information sharing. The methodological trend of systematic review is again demonstrated in the paper by Jalali and Wohlin entitled “Global Software Engineering and Agile Practices: A Systematic Review”. In this case, the topical focus is the employment of Agile methods in a globally distributed context. It is worth noting that this combination at one point seemed nearly impossible because of Agile method’s emphasis on frequent face-to-face communication. But like most engineering methods, Agile represents a broad suite of practices, and this paper shows that some can be effective in a distributed environment, whereas others are often not. One advantage of the systematic review methodology is that it can analyze what kinds of studies contribute to conclusions. In this case, the