Global software development: An approach to design and evaluate the risk factors for global practitioners

Abstract

In today's competitive environment organizations are increasingly moving towards global software development to utilize every possible benefits across geography. Practitioners from different part of the world are undertaking such assignments for multiple benefits like global exposure, new domain/arena to explore, better compensation, etc. In spite of the above benefits these global practitioners face multiple challenges due to cultural difference, communication, geographical dispersion. This paper emphasizes the risk factors on global practitioners in an IT organization. Dependencies of the global practitioners are explored to identify the risk factors using four stages of dynamics model [30]. A Socio Technical Systems (STS) responsibility model is designed for global practitioners to exhibit the relationship between global practitioners within an organization structure and represent the risk of the global practitioners using a set of graphical notations. In addition this paper also proposes a MultiAgent Simulation Model (MASM) to evaluate the risk of global practitioners on gaining trust from project stakeholders. This work highlights the sequential and concurrent activities based on schedule and time for evaluating the risk.