The impact of geographic distribution and the nature of technical coupling on the quality of global software development projects
Geographically dispersed work is a fundamental trend that has shaped software development in the past few decades. Although researchers have shown that such a trend has its costs in terms of product quality, the past empirical work has neglected to consider the multidimensional nature of geographic dispersion and limited attention has been given to the nature of technical coupling in the context of distributed development. The work reported in this paper seeks to achieve a better understanding of how the quality of systems produced by distributed development projects is impacted by the various dimensions of geographic dispersion and by the forms of technical coupling. We examined 189 software projects from a multinational development organization and our results revealed the various dimensions of distribution that had an independent and complementary impact on the software quality. In particular, we found that projects with uneven distributions of developers across locations were more likely to exhibit higher levels of defects than projects with balanced distributions. Our results also showed that logical dependencies among architectural components are significantly more important for projects than syntactic dependencies. Moreover, considering technical coupling as conditional on project boundaries revealed that internal and external dependencies have a significant and independent impact on the software quality. Copyright (C) (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
technical coupling global software development geographical dispersion software quality architectural dependencies