Blocks and Enablers for Global Software Engineering Projects

Abstract

Global software engineering is of growing importance due to reasons of skills, load balancing, response time, local presence and efficiency. However, many GSE projects have run into roadblocks with severe performance impacts. Working in a global context obviously has advantages but also drawbacks. While the positive side accounts for time-zone effectiveness or reduced cost in various countries, we should not close our eyes in front of the severe disadvantages. In fact the business case is surely not a simple trade-off of different cost of engineering in different regions. Working in a globally distributed project means overheads for planning and managing people. It means language and cultural barriers. It creates jealousy between the more expensive engineers being afraid of loosing their jobs, while forced to train their much cheaper counterparts.