Evolving an infrastructure for student global software development projects: lessons for industry

Abstract

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. Today’s information technology, in the form of communication networks and tooling opportunities, provides us with a supposedly ready infrastructure to support GSD. However, selecting an appropriate combination of tools that cross cultural boundaries and account for unique in-country connectivity situations is not a trivial task. In this paper, we describe our experience of evolving an infrastructure for student GSD projects over a period of four years, culminating in an environment to accommodate the needs of five different teams from four globally dispersed universities in countries straddling many technological divides. We suggest that our experience offers lessons that can also support those organizations embarking upon GSD initiatives and with their own infrastructure decisions to make.