Benefits of global software development: exploring the unexplored

Organizations are increasingly moving to the global software development (GSD) model because of significant benefits that can accrue. However, GSD is fraught with challenges arising from geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distances. The emphasis in the literature to date has typically been on how to overcome the challenges associated with GSD. While a number of GSD benefits have been widely referred to in the literature, there are also a number of less obvious benefits that can be inferred as potentially accruing from GSD. In this article, we identify the various benefits of GSD, labeling them as ‘referred’ and ‘inferred’, respectively. We provide a categorization in terms of (a) organizational, (b) team and (c) process-task. While the ‘referred’ benefits most often apply at the organizational level (e.g. cost savings, access to large multi-skilled workforces, reduced time to market and proximity to customer), the ‘inferred’ benefits apply to a greater extent at team and process-task level (e.g. task modularization, team autonomy, improved documentation and clearly defined processes). In the decision of whether or not to globalize software development activities, a categorization including both ‘referred’ and ‘inferred’ benefits will be helpful in providing a synthesis of all potential benefits associated with GSD. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.