Risk Management in Distributed Software Development: A Process Integration Proposal

The goal of this paper is to propose a process to manage risks in globally distributed software development environments. We propose a process integration, aiming to reflect in the operational level all information and decisions taken in the strategic and tactical levels. The operational level is defined as the project risk management process, and the strategic and tactical levels are defined as all work concerning the decision to develop a project using geographically distributed resources. The integration was proposed based on the results found in a case study conducted in a software development center from a multinational organization located in Brazil. Thus, the focus of this study is to help in the understanding of what it is involved when managing risks in distributed software development environments.