Managing Geographically Distributed Software Projects: Success Factors and Lessons Learned

Transcription

1 Managing Geographically Distributed Software Projects: Success Factors and Lessons Learned Analia Irigoyen Ferreiro Ferreira 1, Clarissa Pires 2, Mário Canedo 3, Paulo Armando Rego 2 1 ProMove Business Intelligence Solutions Rua Marechal Mascarenhas de Morais, 120, Copacabana, CEP analia@promovesolucoes.com 2 Chemtech A Siemens Company Rua da Quitanda, 50, 21º andar, Centro, CEP {clarissa.pires, paulo.rego}@chemtech.com 3 Banco BBM Praça Pio X 98, 12º andar, Centro, CEP mariocanedo@bancobbm.com.br Abstract Geographically Distributed Development (GDD) or Global Software Development (GSD) are emerging, in the last decade, as a common way to overcome time and budget restrictions or lack of qualified personnel. On the other hand, these kinds of projects present a set of challenges that influence all aspects of a project, making them more complex. Therefore, organizations all over the world are interested in the success factors and lessons learned about this field in software development. The purpose of this paper is to present our approach and the results of project managers experiences in more than twenty software projects involving five different distributed development scenarios. The analysis is presented according to the strategies, practices and challenges identified by the survey applied to project managers of four organizations. The results are analyzed under the Software Project Management, Software Quality and Technological aspects and point of view. Key-Words: Distributed Development, Project Management, Software Development. I. INTRODUCTION As a result of the growing economic globalization, the number of projects with teams geographically distributed within medium and large organizations is increasing [1]. However, as this kind of projects can bring to the organizations other benefits, this is not the only increasing factor [2,3]. Other factors can also be included in this list: availability of a large pool of skilled people, being able to do round-the-clock development, and, mainly, huge savings that could be gained through low labor cost in developing countries [3]. Therefore, projects managers have to face several kinds of challenges, considering leading teams across different time zones, different continents and even in different hemispheres. These challenges often carry a heavy penalty in terms of slowing down the decision to go ahead with geographically distributed projects. Indeed, existing papers [4] demonstrate that distributed work can take more time to complete than similar projects where all the work is collocated. Moreover, while the production costs might be low in distributed software development, there are increased coordination and technology costs involved [5,6,7]. In this paper, we present the results of the experience obtained so far by four project managers of three different organizations that managed 21 projects geographically distributed, with regard to: project management difficulties and success factors, technological problems and solutions adopted, software quality and others. Results show that this kind of projects can succeed and really bring great benefits for software organizations. The section II discusses distributed team s characteristics and management main challenges. Section III presents the main benefits, difficulties and lessons learned identified by the survey. And also presents the quantitative results of this experience. Finally, section IV points out future directions and conclusions. II. MANAGING DISTRIBUTED TEAMS Increasingly, the new global sourcing reality requires the management of distributed teams geographically dispersed. Therefore, more organizations are concerned to learn and prepare themselves to deal with the management and technological challenges typical of these environments [5]. To achieve the operational excellence, it is known that projects with distributed team need to include more planning,

2 and building team activities than other common projects. The most important planning issue is to strategically select the team members [3,5,8,9] that can work together effectively. Besides, this is essential to overcome the problems that can occur when you have to work in separated locations, as following: non-collaborative personality, the barrier of language and cross-cultural difficulties. The team members selected must have similarity in their culture and their way of communication. However, building team activities and process well defined can mitigate these problems [5,8]. Other important planning issue is Scope Planning [8], team members that are together in the same place must have the same group of requirements. On the other hand, to avoid communication problems, project managers have to continuously increase the human interaction and communication between team members [5]. Also, motivation and integration programs are important to avoid communication problems. The importance of decision making in distributed work is considered other important project management issue [8]. Not only to build a sense that decisions are made fairly and clearly [8] but also allow team members to develop shared decision making [7]. The next section describes the quantitative results of 21 projects in five different geographically distributed scenarios, grouped by managing, quality software and technology aspects. III. QUANTITATIVE RESULTS Four project managers, that managed 21 projects of three different Brazilian organizations, answered a survey for each project, with 22 questions grouped in three sections: Project Characteristics, Technical Problems and Success Factors. The first section contained seven questions about the projects characteristics, which are described in Table I. The objective of the second section, with six questions, was to identify the main technical problems occurred in these projects. Finally, nine questions of the survey s third section addressed to the distributed projects main success factors. In some answers we noticed misinterpretations of the questions by the project managers. In these cases, the results were sent back to them so that the answer could be adjusted. Analyzing this data we could observe that managing distributed software projects brought us different kinds of difficulties, success factors and lessons learned. In this section we present and discuss: (i) details of the different geographically distributed scenarios where these projects were developed; (ii) quantitative results of the risks identified or mitigated among the projects and the success factors considering software project management point of view; (iii) software quality problems identified through the life cycle of the projects involved in this survey; and (iv) quantitative results of problems identified during these projects considering technological aspects. A. Distributed Scenarios of the Projects We analyzed the results of more than 20 projects of Brazilian organizations, considering different perspectives: Software Project Management, Software Quality and Technology. Each one of these perspectives will be presented later in this section. First, it is important to characterize the scenarios (Figure 1) and the projects (Table I) that contributed with important data for our analysis. I III V Organization 1 Organization 1 Organization 1 Organization 3 Organization 3 City B2 II IV Organization 1 Organization 1 Organization 4 City B2 Figure 1. The projects were distributed in five different cenarios. All the projects classified in the scenario I, involved two organizations (customer and software development supplier) in two different cities and in the same country (Brazil). Also, in this scenario, members of the two organizations travelled frequently. The differences between the scenarios I and II are that in the scenario II the projects involved organizations in different countries and only the members of the supplier team travelled frequently. The scenario IV is similar to scenario II, except for the travel responsibility (customer). In the III scenario, there were three organizations involved (two customers and one software development supplier) in the projects. Besides all the organizations involved were located in the same country, only the customers were located in the same city. Finally, in the scenario V, there were four organizations involved with the project (two customers, one software development supplier and one tester supplier). In all of these scenarios, the software work is undertaken at geographically separated locations, and involves communication for information exchanges, coordination and control of groups, activities and artifacts. Besides the geographically distributed scenarios identified in Figure 1, Table I also describes some projects characteristics that were relevant to our success factors quantitative analysis and other conclusions.

3 Projects TABLE I. Scenario Max. Team Size PROJECTS CHARACTERISTICS Main Characteristics Any kind of Training? Defined for the Project? Clear Responsibilities? A I 4 No No No B I 6 No No Yes C I 6 No No Yes D I 8 No No No E I 8 No No No F I 25 Yes Yes Yes G II 2 No No Yes H II 3 No No Yes I II 4 No No Yes J II 9 No Yes Yes K II 10 No No Yes L II 16 No Yes Yes M III 5 Yes Yes Yes N III 5 Yes Yes Yes O III 6 Yes Yes Yes P III 8 Yes Yes Yes Q III 6 No No Yes R III 23 Yes Yes Yes S III 60 Yes Yes Yes T IV 12 No No Yes U V 25 No Yes Yes It s important to notice that the any kind of training? questions refer to: (i) process, when a defined process was established; (ii) technology training (development tools and software engineering best practices); and (iii) support training (hardware, software and communication support). B. Software Project Management Several risks were identified or mitigated during these projects, but only risks related to geographically distributed factors were considered in this analysis. In order to facilitate our analysis, we categorized these risks as following: (i), the risks related with a defined process failure or a non existence defined process for the project (e.g.: a training process not followed, inexistence of a human resource planning and so on); (ii) Selecting Team, any risk related with the activities to obtain the best people for the project (e.g.: non-existence of skills selection criteria, resources negotiation with senior managements and so on); (iii) Infra- Structure, all the working environment risks (e.g.: problems in establishing verification or validation environments; problems with communication tools etc); and (iv) Schedule Conflicts, all risks associated with planning time conflicts, as following: holidays, cultural holidays, travels, management meetings with all the team and so on. As shown in the Figures 2 and 3, 60% of the risks identified or mitigated during the life-cycle of these projects were related with Selecting the Team and Schedule Conflicts risks categories. Besides that, over 80% of these risks were classified as Medium Impact or High Impact, demonstrating their relevance for this kind of projects. Further analysis has shown us that all these risks factors and possible causes were associated with, at least, one cultural aspect. It is possible to conclude that geographically distributed project managers need to be aware of the nature of cultural differences, even when the team is distributed within the same country [7]. As shown in Figure 2, 100% of the risks classified as, when occurred, brought high impact in time, cost or quality to the projects. We also can conclude that in despite of costs to accomplish the defined process activities during the projects, the results of not having a process can be worse [10,11]. Infra-Estructure 24% 16% Selecting the team 32% Schedule Conflicts 28% Figure 2. Percent distribution of management risks in geographically distributed projects. 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Selecting the team Schedule Conf licts Infra- Estructure Low Impact Medium Impact High Impact Figure 3. Percent distribution of management risks in geographically distributed projects, grouped by impact. The Figure 4 shows another important result of this survey, a percent distribution of the success factors, related

4 to distance factors, identified by the project managers of the projects that succeed in cost and time (81%), considering approved baselines throughout the project. To facilitate our analysis we classified these success factors into Oslo s four broad category [8], as following: (i) Collaboration Readiness, considering two broad aspects: selecting the right skills and the cultural organization alignment with the collaboration goal; (ii) Technology Readiness, considering that both individual and organization are prepared to assist geographically distributed work; (iii) Common Ground, considering common base of share knowledge, including process, and vocabulary; and (iv) Nature of Work (the fundamental qualities of a person and social aspects), all the work is carefully planned considering that coupled work is done where people are face-to-face. In addition, the category Others was created to associate other success factors that are not directly related to these distance effects. By analyzing the main Software Quality Problems detected throughout the life cycle of these projects, we could observe that, as shown in Figure 5, 56% of the problems were associated with Technical Solution Area. In addition, 22% of the quality problems detected were associated with the inexistence of formal Verification and Validation activities. Verification 11% Validation 11% Requirements Development 22% Technical Solution 56% Common Ground 12% Technology Readiness 8% Others 4% Collaboration Readiness 53% Nature of The Work 23% Figure 5. Percentual distribution of quality software problems detected in D. Technology There is a wide range of kinds of technologies and tools that can assist in geographically distributed environments, and most of them require support, as shown in Figure 6. More than 65% of technological problems are related to these aspects. Therefore, it is necessary people in the team with huge experience in distributed environments and available technical support. Figure 4. Percent distribution of management success factors in Figure 4 shows that 94% of the success factors identified by the project managers are related do distance effects. Moreover, 53% of these success factors were classified as Collaboration Readiness. This demonstrates that, in distributed situations, project managers need to carefully select their team and analyze the organizations involved before starting a project. It is important to highlight that 23% of the success factors were classified as Nature of Work. Therefore, it is important to detail the work breakdown structure as much as necessary with the main objective to plan coupled work to be done by people that can work face-to-face. C. Software Quality In order to facilitate our analysis, we classified the Software Quality problems related to geographically distributed factors and detected throughout these projects in the following CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) Engineering Areas [9]: Technical Solution, Requirements Development, Verification and Validation. Inadaquate Development Softwares 20% Hardware Configuration 13% Servers Unavailable 27% Communication Failures 27% Inadaquate Tests Environment 13% Figure 6. Percentual distribution of technological problems occurred in IV. CONCLUSIONS This paper described the quantitative results of twenty one Brazilian, considering three aspects. We believe that these results can be used by other organizations that have the same project scenarios and characteristics. Despite of risks and problems identified throughout the projects the results are worthy.

5 We could also observe that, regardless of the scenario, if the team members are distant, then the problems and success factors were always similar. This conclusion was possible because several analyses considering the different scenarios were done and similar results were obtained. Moreover, the success factors analyzed are related to 81% of the projects that succeeded in terms of cost and time. All the success factors, benefits and failures described in this paper reflect team and project managers opinion aligned with qualitative and quantitative results. As demonstrated in section III of this paper, the quantitative results are acceptable and can help organizations to acknowledge and mitigate the risks associated to distributed environments issues. In order to continuously collect lessons learned and to increase the number of succeed projects, we planned to include in the next analysis more projects of different project managers and organizations. ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank all the team members of these projects for the collaboration on the metrics results. We also thank the support of the organizations involved: Chemtech, BL Informática, ProMove and BBM. REFERENCES [1] Nasscom - Mckinsey Report 2002, artdisplay.asp?art_id=1225. Accessed on May, [2] E. Carmel and R. Agarwal, Offshore Sourcing of Information Technology Work by America s Largest Firms. Technical Report, Kogod School, American University, Washington D.C., November [3] D. Coleman and R. Osborne, Managing Projects in a Distributed World: Successful Project, New Behaviors Part 1 and 2, [4] S. De Marie, Using Virtual Times to Manage Complex Projects (A case study), [5] E. Carmel, Collaboration Across Borders and Tome Zone, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, [6] J.R.Evaristo and R. Scudder, Geographically Distributed Project Teams: A Dimensional Analysis, in: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, [7] C. A. Ellis, S. J. Gibbs and G. L. Rein, Groupware: some issues and experiences. in: Communications of the ACM, vol. 34, n. 1, Jan. 1991, p [8] G.M. Olson and J.S. Olson, Distance Matters. Human-Computer Interaction, [9] SEI, "CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV), V1.2," Software Engineering Institute CMU/SEI-2006-TR-008, [10] J. Herbsleb, A. Carleton, J. Rozum, J. Siegel and D. Zubrow, Benefits of CMM Based Software Improvement: Initial Results. Technical Report CMU/SEI-94-TR-13, Software Eng. Inst., Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, [11] A.I.F. Ferreira, G. Santos, R. Cerqueira, M. Montoni, A. Barreto, A.O.S. Barreto and A.R. Rocha, Applying ISO 9001:2000, MPS.BR and CMMI to Achieve Software Maturity: BL Informatica s Pathway, In: 29th Int. Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May, Minneapolis, USA, 2007, pp;