Developing a release management tool to support global software development: An experience report on Android platform

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) has been a trend as the software industry is experiencing increasing commercial globalization. On the other hand, working with distributed teams also face new difficulties and challenges, resulting from geographic separation such as time zone, culture, and activities synchronism. Sidia is a R&D Institute, located in Manaus-Brazil, that develops innovative software solutions on Android Platform in all Latin America. The institute works collaborating with Samsung Mobile Division, located in South Korea, and external stakeholders provided by Mobile Network Operators (MNO) from Latin America countries (e.g., Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru). For this reason, to meet the demands of MNOs, Sidia works in GSD environment. In this context, the project management process becomes difficult due to the coordination of many different stakeholders in a distributed environment, such as tracking requirements, wrong releases, tracking issues. To minimize these difficulties, we developed a tool to support our project management process, called Release Manager (RM). This paper describes the introduction of the RM Tool to improve management in distributed projects for the Android Platform Update.