Global software engineering: Identifying challenges is important and providing solutions is even better

Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become a mainstream trend in industry. An increasing number of companies, irrespective of size and location, have been getting their software developed in an arrangement where a majority of stakeholders are distributed across geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural boundaries. The transformation of GSE from a phenomenon to a paradigm has been spearheaded not only by business needs and organizational desires but also consistent efforts of the GSE community. There has been a dedicated conference series to this area, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE) and its 6 edition provided the two articles that have been included in this special section. This editorial aims at not only to introduce the two articles included in this special section but also to report a sample of the topical trends of research published in the ICGSE series on challenges identified and solutions. It is quite clear that there was a huge amount of efforts dedicated to identifying and reporting GSE challenges but the community has been slow on reporting potential solutions to the known challenges. Whilst it is important to make researchers and practitioners aware of the potential challenges and risks, it is even better to systematically devise, empirically assess, and sufficiently report solutions to the known challenges. Through this editorial we also introduce a framework of ten heuristics for devising, developing, and managing a GSE team for successful implementation of the GSE paradigm in an organization.