Architectural Viewpoints for Global Software Development

Abstract

Current trends in software engineering show that large software projects have to operate with teams that are working in different locations. The reason behind this globalization of software development stems from clear business goals such as reducing cost of development, solving local IT skills shortage, and supporting outsourcing and offshoring. There is ample reason that these factors will be even stronger in the future, and as such we will face a further globalization of software development. To cope with these problems, the concept of Global Software Development (GSD) is introduced. GSD is a relatively new concept in software development that can be considered as the coordinated activity of software development that is not localized and central but geographically distributed.Designing a proper architecture of GSD is important to meet the requirements for the communication, coordination and control of distributed GSD teams.However, an analysis of the literature on GSD shows that research in this area has been generally focused on social issues focusing on some concerns such as intercultural communication problems and coordination. It is generally accepted that software architecture design plays a fundamental role in coping with the inherent difficulties of the development of large-scale and complex software.Unfortunately, in both GSD and software architecture design communities, the architecture design of GSD systems has not been explicitly addressed.

An Evaluation Study of Architectural Design Decision Paradigms in Global Software Development

“…A few of general architectural knowledge management practices for GSD have been proposed and evaluated in [7] and [8]. Furthermore, a literature review has been done [1] to explore architectural knowledge in a GSD context, and six architectural viewpoints are defined to model GSD systems in [24].…”

Evaluating Architectural Design Decision Paradigms in Global Software Development

“…A few of general architectural knowledge management practices for GSD have been proposed and evaluated in [9,10]. Furthermore, a literature review has been done [2] to explore architectural knowledge in GSD context, and six architectural viewpoints are de¯ned to model GSD systems in [27].…”

Software System Architecture of Power Grid with IPMI Approach – A Demand Aware Smart Grid

“…Acommon practice in software architecture design is to apply architectural views to model the design decisions for the various stakeholder concerns .The smart grid architecture is visualized and described with architectural viewpoints to realize the indented features [13], [14], [15], [16].…”

“…The proposed software architecture (figure 5) for the Smart Grids shall choose the 4+1 view model designed by Philippe Crichton [15]. Logical View: The logical view w.r.t the proposed software architecture provides the end users, a secure, reliable, simple mechanism to handle information.…”