Quality in Global Software Development Projects: A Closer Look at the Role of Distribution

Abstract

The impact of distribution on global software development project is well established. Most of the empirical work has focused of a single dimension of distribution such as geographical distance or difference in time zones across locations, leaving other important dimensions of distribution unexplored. In this paper, we take a multi-dimensional view of distribution. In particular, we examined the impact of the nature of the distribution of development teams as well as the nature of the distribution of work on project quality using data from 189 distributed software development projects. Our analysis revealed that projects with uneven distributions of developers across locations were more likely to exhibit higher levels of defects than those projects with balanced distributions. Similarly, projects with uneven distributions of development effort across locations were more likely to exhibit higher levels of defects than those projects with balanced distributions.