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

Global Software Development (GSD) has become the norm in product development. In GSD projects, controlling and management activities are increasingly important as the productsare developed in dynamic environments where requirements, priorities, participating sites, development processes, tools andeven partners are continuously changing. Up-to-date information on project status is critical to completing GSD projectseffectively. The objective of the research reported in this paperwas to make progress from fixed and inflexible measurements towards dynamic, reliable and up-to-date support for decisionmakingin GSD. Based on the study, it is shown that dynamic measurements are enabled via the use of automated and real-timeindicators 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

Keywords:

Measurements , Metrics , Distributed development , Global software development , Project management