Toward a Framework for Localisation of Product Software across Organisational Boundaries

Distributed agile development (DAD) is a current trend for software development. It uses agile practices to promote iteration and flexibility in the distributed development of software projects. DAD involves a software vendor and their customers working together, leading to an overlap between their organisations. In this report, which is a progress report submitted for continuation towards a PhD, we introduce the agile software development and propose a framework for the localisation of software products across organisational and cultural boundaries. The framework addresses and accommodates the key components of the area between software vendors and customers. Our approach is useful in that it helps project managers, stakeholders and developers to understand the correlations and critical factors associated with customers and software vendors. This framework tries to cover all the important aspects of the development of agile software across distributed organisational cultures instead of focusing on a specific aspect such as project management. Agile software development is a significant departure from the plan-based approaches of software engineering (Morien and Wongthongtham, 2008). The issue of how software products can be produced and delivered faster, better and cheaper is the main motivation of the huge demand to adopt agile in different software projects. As a matter of fact, agile methods have promoted iterative approach principles as well as agile values to meet that demand for producing faster software products (Abrahamsson et al., 2002). On the other hand, software producers are looking at lower costs and highly skilled human resources to develop software products. Thus, the concept of distributed software development (DSD) has appeared. Although there are several advantages to this concept, there are disadvantages such as communications challenges, the cultural difference issue and the difference in time zones (Jiménez et al., 2009). Over the last two decades, agile methods have been adopted on a number of occasions, as well as distributed software development in different sized projects (Beck, 1999). Consequently, the new trend in agile adoption is to apply agile principles to DSD projects to achieve the features of DSD and agile methods at the same time. Adopting agile methods on DSD often increases some of the challenges of DSD, such as communication, due to the emphasis of the agile approach on face to face communication (Fowler and Highsmith, 2001) which does not exist in DSD. Despite this fact, several distributed agile development projects have been successful in the industrial context (Sureshchandra and Shrinivasavadhani, …