Managing Product Delivery Quality in Distributed Software Development

Distributed software development is a globally accepted practice by large organizations for achieving significant cost savings in research and development. However when it comes to product quality, defect prevention and early detection has always been a challenge. Factors such as differences in language, coding standards and documentation styles across distributed teams can aggravate the situation. These issues, if not addressed, will manifest themselves as product defects leading to enormous costs in fixing at later phases of development. This in turn reduces the business partner or product owner's confidence. Thus, along with defining effective processes to address these issues, it becomes very important to ensure that the product quality expectations of various stakeholders are understood and mutually agreed upon. This paper summarizes our approach and practice in managing these issues while also delivering the expected product quality in our recent project.