Technological support for distributed agile development

Because of the distance between the dispersed development locations, Global Software development (GSD) is confronted with challenges regarding communication, coordination and control of the development work. At the same time, agile software development is strongly built upon communication between engineers and has proven its benefits, although, mostly on one single site. As such, it might be advantageous to combine GSD with agile development. This blend however is not straightforward since the distributed and agile development approaches might have conflicting convictions. In this thesis we will discuss the advantages and challenges of combining GSD with agile development based on a literature-based research. The main results presented in the theoretical part of this thesis (Part I through V), are: (i) aspects of agile software development, (ii) benefits and challenges associated with these in relation to GSD, (iii) categories of technological support for agile GSD, (iv) a framework depicting the mutual relations among them and (v) a discussion regarding specific technologies that support collaborative development in relation to this framework. Based on one of the recommendations we make in the theoretical part of this thesis we also perform practical research (Part VI) in which we define a list of requirements for an Integrated Collaborative Development Environment (ICDE) and show the technical feasibility of a number of concepts which realize these.