How can agile practices minimize global software development co-ordination risks?

Abstract

The distribution of project stakeholders in Global Software Development (GSD) projects provides significant risks related to project communication, coordination and control processes. There is growing interest in applying agile practices in GSD projects in order to leverage the advantages of both approaches. In some cases, GSD project managers use agile practices to reduce project distribution challenges. We use an existing coordination framework to identify GSD coordination problems due to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances. An industry-based case study is used to describe, explore and explain the use of agile practices to reduce development coordination challenges.