12.1 Introduction

The term/phenomena of distributed software development or global software development (GSD) is a common practice in software development organizations. GSD is the process in which an organization onshore or nearshore outsources their software development activities entirely or partially with another software development organization. The most important reason for an organization to decide to go for GSD is the lower development cost [1-3]. There are some other benefits that influence an organization towards GSD such as reduced cycle time [1,4-7], access to more extensive and multi-skilled labor forces [3,8], the effectiveness of time zones [1,3,9], closeness to market and customers [10], innovation and shares best practices [11]. However, the geographical, temporal, cultural, and organizational distances create challenges in GSD, including communication, coordination, control, and collaboration [2,12,13].

The geographical distance results in a lack of informal or limited communication [5], lack of awareness [14], and difficulties in knowledge management [15]. The temporal distance creates challenges, including restricted synchronous communication and delayed feedback [16]. The trust and confidence between sites are negatively affected due to sociocultural distances [9,17-18]. The socio-cultural differences also introduce inconsistent process standards and minimized grapevine communication due to linguistic differences and diverse terminologies [11]. The level of experience, different process maturity levels, standards, tools, and different levels of experience are the challenges that occur due to the organizational differences [11,19]. As a result, it makes managing GSD projects more complex [11,19-22].

A large number of GSD projects have failed due to the absence of effective management [20]. It is imperative to perform improved and well-established PM approaches or practices to be successful in projects managed in the GSD environment. However, previously, it has been observed that GSD projects mostly failed due to poor PM activities. The most significant challenges dealt with PM issues and included, but were not limited to, “communication management, cultural differences awareness, specifying internal work processes and developing internal management skills” [19,21]. These challenges can affect the quality of GSD projects and can reduce profit [2]. Despite the importance of these problems, little research has been carried out to improve PM practices for GSD.

In this chapter, PM challenges encountered in GSD projects are investigated. In this regard, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to report PM issues in GSD projects. The following research question (RQ) was designed to achieve the research objective of this study:

• RQ: What are the project management challenges in global software development?

The remaining contents of this chapter are organized as follows: Section 12.2 describes the background. The methodology used for this research is presented in Section 12.3. We present and discuss the results in Section 12.4. Finally, Section 12.5 presents our conclusions.

12.2 Related Work

Global software development (GSD) has become a key profit strategy for many organizations in the software industry. The following section describes the state-of-the-art literature review on the PM in the GSD environment. Da Silva et al. [21] performed the SLR and discovered the challenges, tools, and models used in the GSD projects. They included 54 studies published between 1998 and 2009. Based on the data extracted from these studies, they proposed an evidenced-based distributed software development PM improvement model.

Another study by Khan et al. [19] identified the challenges in global software development and stated that “geographical, temporal, cultural, and linguistic distances” all negatively impact coordination and cooperation. To overcome these challenges, the author also identified the areas in which the project manager can progress by considering the “organizational virtual team strategy, risk management, infrastructure, implementation of a virtual team process, team structure and organization, and conflict management.”

Mishra and Alok [23] highlighted the research trends and management issues in GSD. The authors included the papers published between 2000 and 2011 in their review. After analysis, the authors pointed out that a lot of research had been done in requirement management, PM, knowledge management, and process management. However, little interest had been paid to configuration, risk, and quality management. The authors also highlighted the importance of research in these areas.

Niazi et al. [24] have identified the challenges of PM in GSD from the perspective of the client and vendor. They performed a two-fold study. First, they performed an SLR to identify the challenges of PM in GSD. Second, the challenges identified through SLR were validated through a questionnaire survey. They have identified nineteen challenges critical for the success of PM in the GSD setting. Lack of cultural understanding, lack of communication, and time management due to a difference in time region were the critical challenges with high frequency. In another study by Niazi et al. [25], the authors found the success factors related to successful PM in GSD environment. They performed a twofold study: first, they identified the success factors in the literature related to successful project management in GSD and validated these factors in real-world practice. Second, they mapped the identified success factors to the ten areas of the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK). Their results show a positive correlation between the factors retrieved in the literature and the survey. They identified 18 success factors in the literature; organizational structure, skills, project management, communication, and collaboration are critical and the most common success factors with high frequency.

Jain and Suman [26] proposed a project management framework for global software development. They observed that the failure rate in GSD is high due to the lack of frameworks and standard procedures. In this study, the authors highlighted the standard procedures and frameworks introduced by the PMBOK for managing projects. However, these standards and frameworks are not commonly used by the organizations in GSD. The authors took the areas of PMBOK with the knowledge areas essential for the effective management of GSD. This framework will guide the project manager about the aspects to be considered while performing remote projects. The authors also highlighted that the framework would act as a baseline for the research in the global software project management domain.

12.3 Methodology

In this section, a systematic literature review (SLR) method is used to report PM challenges in the GSD environment. SLR is a method used to identify existing research studies relevant to specific research questions [27]. We followed the Kitchenham guidelines for conducting SLR. According to Kitchenham [27], an SLR consists of three phases: planning, conducting, and reporting [35]. Each phase is further divided into substeps (see Table 12.1).

12.3.2 Conducting the Review

12.3.2.1 Primary Study Selection

The search string extracted research articles from identified data sources. We refined the extracted studies by the tollgate method proposed by Afzal et al. [29], which consists of five phases. In the first phase (1-Ph), relevant articles were extracted by searching using search terms. In, the second phase (2-Ph), the criteria for studies inclusion and exclusion were applied to the title and abstract. The introduction and conclusions were filtered in the third phase (3-Ph) based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. In phase four (4-Ph), inclusion-exclusion was based on the complete article. Final selection of studies was included in SLR in phase five (5-Ph).

The search strings retrieved 1722 initial studies from five different data sources based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The resultant articles were refined further using the tollgate approach and inclusion-exclusion criteria. Finally, a total of 33 sources were included in this review. The selected studies were evaluated based on the quality assessment criteria (see Section 12.1).

12.3.2.2 Data Extraction and Data Synthesis

We extracted the study’s title, study type, research methodology, and year of publication to solve our research question. The selected primary studies were tagged as (S), which represent the study. The first and second authors reported the project management challenges occurring in GSD. The third author mapped the identified challenges with project management knowledge areas.

12.4 Results and Discussion

The SLR resulted in 25 PM challenges in GSD, as shown in Table 12.4. In this study, we found communication management as the most frequently occurring challenge in GSD projects. In a total of 33 studies, communication management was extracted from 31 (93%). From the selected sources, we observed that many GSD projects fail due to a lack of an effective mechanism for communication. One study claimed that 40% of GSD projects are not successful due to the lack of face-to-face communication [30]. The issue of face-to-face meetings decreases informal contact, leading to a lack of awareness and reduced trust [31]. The capabilities of communication management have an important impact on GSD projects. Therefore, a fundamental GSD challenge is that many of the techniques that function to coordinate work in a collocated environment are missing or disrupted [32].

The second most frequently occurring challenge in managing GSD projects is the lack of cultural understanding in teams. This challenge recorded 78% in selected primary studies. Software is developed in a multi-site, multi-cultural, distributed environment. The project manager faces formidable change on many levels, from technical to social and cultural [33]. Misunderstandings between virtual teams can occur due to cultural differences [34].

Mapping identified challenges with project management knowledge areas: The extracted PM challenges in GSD were mapped with PMBOK knowledge areas, as illustrated in Table 12.5.

12.5 Conclusion and Future Work

The advancements in information and communication technologies and lower development cost have led software organizations to distribute their work across different geographical locations. However, many GSD projects failed in achieving the expected advantages. One of the reasons behind the failure ratio of GSD projects was ineffective management.

In this chapter, an SLR was conducted to report PM challenges in GSD projects. The study resulted in 25 PM challenges in GSD projects. The most occurring challenge is the lack of communication management with the frequency of 31 (93%) out of 33 studies. Other challenges that recorded higher than 50% were lack of culture recorded, lack of cultural understanding in team, lack of coordination, geographical distances, lack of trust and fear, lack of time zone differences, and time zone differences coordination language barriers. Furthermore, all the extracted challenges were mapped with PMBOK knowledge areas.

In the future, we would like to continue this work by removing biases in mapping by applying fuzzy AHP. We also would like to propose a PM framework for GSD projects by considering the results of this study.