Introduction

The low-wage countries like China and India have engaged in Global software development and at low costs. Research indicates that software developing organizations have doubled their efforts into investing and becoming global leaders in Global Software Development (GSD). Indeed, there are more than 50 countries in the world that have active participation in GSD as well as software exporting which is fast becoming robust in the low-wage nations. Such forms of development have grown in popularity owing to the idea that it is ideally beneficial among customer and vendor organizations. However, GSD is becoming popular and at the same time controversial with regard to software engineering even at a time when large corporations and their networks have become widely distributed all over the world.

The objective of this research study is to outline the problems of Software Process Improvement (SPI) regarding GSD projects as indicated by the software practitioners. Moreover, there is a desire to design a viable checklist manual for both small and large GSD software organizations that desire to make improved software processes. Consequently, the manual will aid the GSD based software companies to identify the essential problems that they are likely to encounter during the implementation process of software initiatives. These GSD based software companies must, therefore, have the ability to focus and indeed make maximum efforts towards avoiding such problems as highlighted in the manual. However, advanced research on Software Process Improvement (SPI) indicates that the new technology along with work practices is in most cases acquired though poorly deployed.

Literature review

According to Karlheinz and Faisal, (2001) to be successful and counter the diverse challenges, companies ought to adapt newer processes and make improvements in a bid to continuously address the various developing challenges associated with global software development. In GSD, there are various failures affiliated with software development including incomplete development and project time overruns. Moreover, other challenges on GSD and software development include causing excess confidence and trust among the outsourcing organizations, designing of global software development practices, and customer expectations management with a goal of addressing what is or is not performed in the distributed settings.

To find solutions for such issues, adopting the methodologies of Software Process Improvement as well as Software Quality Management standards are paramount. Furthermore, the Software Process Improvement (SPI) (Stark, Arlt, and Walker, 2006) gives extra benefits towards increasing the productivity of work, reducing redundancy rates, and creating manageable software processes by adopting improved tools, methodologies, and techniques. As a result, the research focuses on conducting Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process whose focus is on presentation of a transparent evaluation for the research thesis by using thorough and trustworthy search methodology that is subject to audit. In this research too is Pakistan’s software practitioner which takes into consideration the fair and transparent analysis of Software Process Improvement problems in GSD development. To get more precise empirical results, there was conducted a research involving 12 GSD based software companies that are registered in Pakistan and also assessed by CMMI (Stallinger, 2000).

In general, the research was outlined with the aim of reducing the gap between research and real action in such a manner that duly allows for accessibility of both practitioners as well as researchers. Furthermore, the research is bound to provide a guideline for a state-of-the-art methodology for countering Software Process Improvement problems (Sahay, Nicholson, and Krishna, 2003) and hence creating new avenues that are essential for identification of possible new research lines. In a bid to become competent leaders within the on the global market, many software developing companies have resulted in global software development (GSD). Such cases are gradually becoming attractive and catching the attention of many software companies due to a couple of reasons as discussed. Firstly, it allows concerned companies to hire competent human resources within a geographically distributed zone and with less expense.

Secondly, there is increased overall business market through software production among the remote customers. Final, it provides a platform for the benefits of working round the clock by making available the advantages of a time difference within the diverse geographical regions. In addition, GSD (Ojelanki and Nielsen, 2002) encounters high profile challenges that result from socio-culture as well as geographical distances and that are resultant from the diverse cultures and time differences. However, the challenges differ from one organization to the other depending on the particular features defining every software company. In fact, they pose direct effects on project organization, the process of controlling and monitoring, and the general project quality since communication, coordination and collaboration could with no doubt be very difficult especially if the software components are obtained from diverse geographical areas. Therefore, the effects of such factors have an effect on the software in aspects such as design, make, and the mode of delivery to clients is hence leaving its influence on the affiliated stages of a software lifecycle. It is though necessary to solve the problems before obtaining full potential for global development. Among other numerous challenges is to find out a viable formula for improving the software development process within these global software development companies.

There are numerous software development companies in sought of means of adopting software process improvement (SPI) measures in a bid to compete globally. With regard to Software Process Improvement (SPI) research, it is true that the level of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is deemed the major criteria for selecting an outsourcing vendor. The latter have adopted CMMI certification to work as a marketing platform for attracting the customers. As indicated by the SEI appraisal report of 2006, (Nguyen, Ali-baber, and Verner, 2006.) there were 104 Indian based companies that took part in CMMI appraisals and were all CMMI certified. India is hence receiving above 80% of the cumulative offshore development revenue all over the globe along with CMMI certification (Sahay, Nicholson, and Krishna, 2003) which is deemed one major reason for outlining the prominence lead with software market. On the other hand, Pakistan is positioned far behind such competitive platforms and the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) states that there are just 21 software companies that are duly CMMI certified and only one software company has advanced to level 5. However, regardless of the rising importance of SPI, there is little research from previous records done to outline the issues whose effects undermine software processes improvement initiatives with regard to GSD (Oza, 2006).

On this basis, this research is greatly motivated towards the identification of software processes improvement issues for GSD projects as found in diverse literature sources. Moreover, it helps the Pakistan’s medium sized as well as the large software organizations with manuals defining the essential SPI problems as directed by expert software practitioners of CMMI organizations of Pakistan. It is believed that good understanding of SPI challenges does not just help in finding mitigation measures for the main and critical problems for SPI implementation initiatives and also helps to successfully implement SPI initiatives.

Objectives

To identify Software Process Improvement (SPI) problems in GSD projects cited by software practitioners and to design a manual for a checklist for medium and large size GSD based software companies who want to improve their software processes.
To determine how actual business goals are the major motivation for an SPI practitioner by practicing excellent software development and improving management processes/activities.
To identify those problems that is perceived to undermine software process improvement initiatives in globally distributed software development projects.
To determine the readiness for many medium and large-scale software companies in Global Software Development (GSD) paradigm as well as initiating Software Process Improvement (SPI) in order to compete internationally.

Research question

The research study is aimed at identifying the main problems that are regarded as having undermined the processes of software development and improvement measures within the internationally distributed software projects (Bikram Sengupta, 2006). A major research area is on the software processes improvement problems with regard to GSD. This research question is designed so that the single research question would extract software process improvement problems in GSD. This is as outlined in the literature going up to the present day through systematic literature review, as well as software process modes of improvement problems as described by the software practitioners, on the basis of their experiences and knowledge, and more so by surveying the Pakistan Software industry.

Significance

At a moment when the companies are enjoying the important potential benefits of software development in the world, many critical challenges and barriers emerge in the complex mechanism of the settings distributed. In cases of this scenario, the organizations of the software require to adapt and improve the software process to succeed in international. Continues Improvement of software is of great importance to the company of the software. Any improvement in the software process encourages change in an organization by introducing new techniques and practices of work.

Research design

For the study’s data collection, data was collected from individual interviews. The interviews were conducted among the selected participants (Kanungo & Monga, 2005) and hence to collect data for the study, the researcher had to find an appropriate sample size for the study. For this particular research, most of the primary data was obtained from the selected participants by use of individual interviews. On the other hand, secondary data from software development organizations from the technology sectors, journals, periodicals and any other relevant electronic sources that could provide reliable and relevant information. To get the answers to questions of research, one divide the overall research into two phases namely; review of the systematic literature which is phase 1 and survey of the industry of Pakistan software which is phase 2.

Various tasks were performed, which included, first, a review of a systematic literature for the identification of the problems in improving those software processes in GSD which in the literature up are reported up to the present date. Secondly, analysis of the views of a practitioner in the identification of problems in improving the process of the software in the GSD context was performed. The next task is to analyse the review of the systematic literature in order to identify the direction of further research. Another task conducted is the survey of the industry of the software in order to identify the problems in improving the process of the software in the context of GSD from the views of the practitioners, on the basis of experience. Finally, a checklist manual is conducted based on analyzing the expert software according to the views of the practitioners for companies of software that are which are medium and large sized.

The chapter demonstrates the phase two of the research, which is surveying the industry of Pakistan software. The 12 top ten software company in Pakistan that are medium and large sized were selected, which are Pakistan software export Board (PSEB) registered and capability maturity model integration (CMMI) assessed. A total of fifty-four practitioners of software owned by different domains of engineering software participated in direct interview sessions which were done face to face. The later chapter describes the survey results in details after analyzing the views of the practitioners. There were transparency and no bias in the views of the practitioners, and on the basis of their knowledge and experience while dealing with improving the process of software on the GSD context in the companies of the software.

Plan and thesis requirements

For global software development, the developers are based located in different time zones that benefit the organizations to take advantage of maximum time around the clock. This kind of scenario is also known as follow-the-sun or round-the-clock development (Eoin, Helena, Agerfalk, 2006). Through time zone effectiveness, organizations achieve longer working hours on the development projects. When one site finishes working on a project for the day, developers at the other site in a different time zone start working on it thus potentially achieving a 24-hour workday. The second is the efficiency, which was used in turnaround language as ways to reduce cost and improving outcomes. The adoption of efficiency-oriented recovery strategies and the realization of efficiency gains are essential to successful recovery. Two critical insights are reported for developers: first, they begin turnarounds by focusing on efficiency rather than entrepreneurial, strategic or program moves. Secondly, they start recovery work by shifting resources from less productive programs to more productive ones.

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