End-to-end features as meta-entities for enabling coordination in geographically distributed software development

Abstract

The nature of the software development work activities and their inter-relationships makes supporting geographically distributed software development projects a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we discussed the limitations of the traditional organizational design views in terms of coordination in the context of geographically distributed software development projects. We propose the well-established concept of a product feature as a framework to improve support distributed product development projects through collaborative tools that enhance the coordination capabilities of the development organization. Finally, we present a conceptual idea on how such improvement could be realized using product features as the center pieces for communication and coordination in distributed software development.