A survey on the impact of risk factors and mitigation strategies in global software development

Abstract

Global software projects face numerous challenges generated by the geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distribution of the actors involved. Project managers’ primary task is to ensure the project’s success and therefore must use risk management techniques and tools to identify and mitigate risks. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and improve a risk management framework previously presented by the authors of this article, based on a survey of industry’s practitioners. The framework contains 39 risk factors and 58 mitigation strategies classified using Leavitt’s model of organizational change. An online questionnaire was used to gather data from 10 managers and 7 developers and the Spearman’s rank correlation was used to compare the results of the two groups. Results indicate an agreement between managers and developers on risk factors related to communication and technology and on mitigation strategies associated to communication and project management.