Study of Automated and Real-time Indicators for the Management of Global Software Development Projects

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) has become the norm in product development. In GSD projects, controlling and management activities are increasingly important as the products are developed in dynamic environments where requirements, priorities, participating sites, development processes, tools and even partners are continuously changing. Up-to-date information on project status is critical to completing GSD projects effectively. The objective of the research reported in this paper was to make progress from fixed and inflexible measurements towards dynamic, reliable and up-to-date support for decision-making in GSD. Based on the study, it is shown that dynamic measurements are enabled via the use of automated and real-time indicators with consolidated information via visualised dashboards. The paper concludes that automatically produced real-time indicators, whose data are gathered from various databases and even from different stakeholders, are a robust and feasible method to support decision-making in GSD.