1. Globally distributed software development project performance

We undertook a series of field studies with a goal to understand the effects of global work dispersion on the productivity and quality of distributed software development. It is increasingly common for firms to distribute their software development projects across multiple locations. While the global delivery model of software development has many benefits, work dispersion can also have negative effects such as increased coordination costs and reduced productivity. Unfortunately, the negative effects of dispersion have received little research attention from the academic community. We develop a model of globally distributed software development project performance, and using the empirical data from our field studies we investigate the negative consequences of dispersion. Our analysis reveals that, even in high process maturity environments, dispersion significantly reduces development productivity and has effects on conformance quality. Fortunately, we find that some of these negative effects of dispersion can be significantly mitigated through deployment of structured software engineering processes.

2. Balancing structured and agile processes in software development

In this project, we investigate the software development process choices made by project teams at two leading offshore vendors. In particular, we focus on the performance implications of project teams that chose to augment structured, plan-driven processes to implement the CMM level-5 Key Process Areas (KPAs) with agile methods. Our analysis reveals that the decision to augment the firm-recommended, plan-driven approach with improvised, agile methods was significantly affected by the extent of client knowledge and involvement, the newness of technology, and the project size. Furthermore this decision had a significant and mostly positive impact on project performance indicators such as reuse, rework, defect density, and productivity.

3. Knowledge-driven quality improvement in distributed software development

We explicate how the key process areas of the capability maturity model (CMM) can be utilised as a platform to launch learning routines in offshore software development, and thereby explain why some offshore software development process improvement initiatives are more effective than others. We validate our learning-mediated model of offshore software project performance by utilising data collected from a field study at a large firm that operates at the CMM level-5 process maturity. Our results indicate that investments in structured processes mitigate the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We also find that the effect of software process improvement initiatives is mediated through investments in process-based learning activities. These results imply that investments in structured processes and the corresponding process-based learning activities can be an economically viable way to counter the challenges of work dispersion and improve offshore project performance. We discuss the implication of these results for the adoption of normative process models by offshore software firms.

Selected Publications

[1] N. Ramasubbu, S. Mithas, M.S. Krishnan, and C.F. Kemerer. Work Dispersion, Process-Based Learning, and Offshore Software Development Performance. MIS Quarterly, 32(2), pp. 437-458, 2008.

[2] N. Ramasubbu and R. K. Balan. Towards governance schemes for distributed software development projects. 1st international workshop on Software development governance (SDG08),  proceedings pp 11-14, 2008.

[3] N. Ramasubbu and R.K. Balan. Globally Distributed Software Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis. Foundations of Software Engineering Conference (FSE) , proceedings pp. 125-134, 2007.

[4] N. Ramasubbu, P. Kompalli, and M.S. Krishnan. A Process Maturity Framework for Managing Distributed Development. IEEE Software, pp. 80-86, May/June 2005.