Software complexity accrues, as modern societies are highly dependent on large-scale, software-intensive systems that increasingly operate within an environment of continuous availability. Global software development (GSD) vendors strive to reduce this complexity by decomposing the target software product into various components that are developed in-house, outsourced or purchased as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Subsequently, these components are integrated into a final working product. However, there is a lack of specific practices to be followed by GSD vendors in the software integration phase. In our previous study, we identified a list of nine software integration critical success factors (CSFs) for GSD vendors. In order to assist GSD vendors in adoption of the identified CSFs, we conducted another Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for identification of practices and validated the results using questionnaire survey. We identified 116 software integration practices/solutions that will help GSD vendors in trimming down the complexity of their software integration process.
Over the last decade, the use of agile methods has grown dramatically for software development. Agile methods guarantee to accelerate the delivery of remarkable software with increased user satisfaction and reduced cost. However, in recent years, due to emergence of green software engineering, software developers are compelled to focus more on green and sustainable aspects of software. Global software engineering aims to design, develop, and use a software with limited energy and computing resources. Recently, software engineers in global software development (GSD) have adapted agile methods for quick, interactive, and environment‐friendly software development. However, there is a lack of specific practices to be followed by GSD vendors in the development of green and sustainable software. In this study, we have identified 36 agile practices through systematic literature review and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions; 53 relevant papers were identified and reviewed. Findings of the systematic literature review were then empirically validated through questionnaire survey in GSD industry, in which 106 relevant experts from 25 different countries participated. The identified agile practices are intended to assist GSD vendors in strengthening their agile maturity towards green and sustainable software development.
Most of the software development projects have traditionally been faced with severe problems in terms of quality, cost, and time. Researchers and practitioners have focused on agile software development methods (ASDMs) as an alternative to overcome these problems. Agile methods employ iterative development cycles, interspersed by user feedback. Agile methods were basically developed for small development teams. Scaling agile methods is a big issue from different perspectives. De-motivators play a key role in project management as it allows early identification and prompt management of threats that may arise during project execution. The objective of this paper is to identify the de-motivators while scaling agile at large, from management perspectives. We have adapted SLR and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions, followed by selecting the required research papers, data extraction, and data synthesis, which resulted in 15 demotivators from 58 relevant papers. Some of the identified de-motivators are 'traditional organizational culture', 'lack of agile experts', 'reluctance to adopt', and 'lack of management and commitment support'. The identified factors have been compared from various perspectives, such as continents, digital libraries, organization size, and so forth.
Agile methods are extensively adapted by software development organizations due to the competitive benefits it offers. In recent years global software development (GSD) projects practice agile methods as prominent methods to deliver the software in increments with utmost user satisfaction and affordable cost. Beside the use of agile methods, the software industry has also considered the green aspect of software, to be in line with the demands of the organizations and the world technological ecosystem. The green and sustainable feature of software should focus both the energy and resource efficiency key factors. This phenomenon of embedding the green flavor in software has emerged a new research area, green software engineering, that promises the development of eco-friendly software with minimum energy and use of less computing resources, to trim down the adverse effects on both society and environment. The principal objective of this research study is to design and develop a multi-level Green-Agile Maturity Model (GAMM) to assess the GSD vendors' agile maturity in terms of green software development. The model has been built in four phases. In phase I and II, systematic literature review (SLR) was performed to identify the success factors and risk factors that either supports or hinders the green and sustainable software development respectively by practicing the agile methods in GSD. The results have been validated from 106 relevant experts, dealing with agile and green software projects, through questionnaire survey. The experts' demographic represents 25 different countries. We also identified the industry practices through SLR and survey, to address our identified critical factors. Phase III of this research deals with development of the GAMM by categorizing the identified factors into seven Green-Agile maturity levels. A similar approach has been used in other models such as Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Implementation Maturity Model (IMM) and Software Outsourcing Vendors Readiness Model (SOVRM). In phase IV of this research, five case studies were conducted at GSD organizations, to evaluate the structure and efficacy of the GAMM, while as a major contribution, this paper presents our developed model, the GAMM, which aims to assess the green-agile maturity of the GSD vendors in terms of green and sustainable software development. INDEX TERMS Agile software development, Green and sustainable software, Green-Agile Maturity Model (GAMM), Global software development (GSD), Agile methods
Global software development (GSD) is gaining momentum due to the potential benefits it offers. GSD aims at delivering remarkable software through a widely distributed pool of experts, with reduced efforts, minimum cost and time. In recent years, GSD developers have reshaped the development processes and have adopted agile techniques and green engineering principles to cope with the frequent changes in requirements, accelerate the development in short increments and to produce energy efficient and sustainable software. However, the adoption of agile methods for developing sustainable software possesses a number of challenges. This paper presents a list of potential challenges/risks identified through systematic literature review (SLR) that need to be avoided by the GSD vendors using agile methods for the development of green and sustainable software. Our findings reveal eight risk factors that are faced by GSD vendors in the development of green and sustainable software using agile methods. GSD vendors are encouraged to address properly all the identified factors in general and the most-frequently cited critical risks in particular, such as insufficient system documentation, limited support for real-time systems and large systems, management overhead, lack of customer's presence, lack of formal communication and lack of long term planning.
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