On the use of handover checkpoints to manage the global software development process

Abstract

Despite the fact that global software development (GSD) is steadily becoming the standard engineering mode in the software industry, commercial projects still struggle with how to effectively manage it. Recent research and our own experiences from numerous GSD projects at Capgemini sd&m indicate that staging the development process with handover checkpoints is a promising practice in order to tackle many of the encountered problems in practice. In this paper we discuss typical management problems in GSD. We describe how handover checkpoints are used at Capgemini sd&m to control and safely manage large GSD projects. We show how these handover checkpoints and the use of cohesive and self-contained work packages effectively mitigate the discussed management problems. We are continuously refining and improving our handover checkpoint approach by applying it within large scale commercial GSD projects. We thus believe that the presented results can serve the practitioner as a fundament for implementing and customizing handover checkpoints within his own organisation. © Springer-Verlag 2009.