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Using global pairs for reducing software development time

Published: 24 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

With globalization, many software corporations have engineering groups working in different time zones. While a globally distributed team with engineers in different time-zones has been leveraged successfully in maintenance for reducing response time, not much work has been done on reducing the time in a development project, and globally distributed teams are mostly used to provide capacity benefit. We propose the use of global-pairs as a simple method of organizing global resources for leveraging time zone differences for reducing the cycle time. Instead of assigning tasks to individual resources, a project can assign tasks to global-pairs, each having one resource working in one time zone and the other in opposite time zone. Each global-pair is self-organizing and divides the work in a manner such that work within a task progresses continuously, thereby reducing the time to complete the assigned task by up to a half. Use of global pairs does not unduly complicate project management -- a key difficulty in global software development -- as a project looks same as before, except that some of the resources now "work faster". Initial experiment with a global pair in the coding phase of a live project suggests that the concept is feasible and can reduce the cycle time significantly.

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  • (2011)Issues in Global Software Development: A Critical ReviewJournal of Software Engineering and Applications10.4236/jsea.2011.41006904:10(590-595)Online publication date: 2011

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ISEC '11: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
February 2011
229 pages
ISBN:9781450305594
DOI:10.1145/1953355
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 24 February 2011

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Author Tags

  1. global software development
  2. project management
  3. software process

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ISEC '11
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  • Computer Society of India
ISEC '11: Indian Software Engineering Conference
February 24 - 27, 2011
Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India

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Overall Acceptance Rate 76 of 315 submissions, 24%

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  • (2011)Issues in Global Software Development: A Critical ReviewJournal of Software Engineering and Applications10.4236/jsea.2011.41006904:10(590-595)Online publication date: 2011

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