A Survey on the State of the Practice in Distributed Software Development: Criteria for Task Allocation
This addresses a critical management challenge in global software development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing survey work without introducing new methods.
The study tackled the problem of insufficient understanding of criteria for task allocation in distributed software development by conducting qualitative interviews with managers, identifying that sourcing strategy and software type significantly influence the applied criteria.
The allocation of tasks can be seen as a success-critical management activity in distributed development projects. However, such task allocation is still one of the major challenges in global software development due to an insufficient understanding of the criteria that influence task allocation decisions. This article presents a qualitative study aimed at identifying and understanding such criteria that are used in practice. Based on interviews with managers from selected software development organizations, criteria currently applied in industry are identified. One important result is, for instance, that the sourcing strategy and the type of software to be developed have a significant effect on the applied criteria. The article presents the goals, design, and results of the study as well as an overview of related and future work.