Cloud-based support for global software engineering: potentials, risks, and gaps.
Abstract
Global Software Engineering (GSE) aims at utilizing global expertise and reducing time-to-market and costs for software development. However, GSE faces serious challenges related to the communication, coordination and provision of development environments for geographically distributed GSE sites, resulting in increased costs. Nowadays, cloud computing offers a costeffective and a handy solution to provide computing support for global business. In particularly, it provides potential and viable solutions to address concerns and challenges in GSE. We have reviewed the relevant literature on cloud-based support for GSE and identified a set of pros and cons for supporting GSE with cloud services. We also present some recommendations to increase the trustworthiness and productivity with cloud-based support for GSE. This paper outlines the potential benefits and risks of cloud computing to GSE and identifies some gaps that need to be addressed by cloud-based support towards more trustworthy and productive work environment for GSE. This will open windows of opportunities for tailoring the solution utilizing cloud-based support for GSE. Figure 1. An overview of GSE process. However, GSE faces some challenges including: geographic, cultural, linguistic, and temporal (i.e. difference in term of time zones) dimension forming what is called global distance [6-8, 15]. Another big challenge of GSE is associated with the effort needed for building on-premises IT infrastructure needed to run a project whose development team is dispersed across multiple geographical areas which is costly. These costs include the effort needed for installation, licensing, monitoring the performance and maintaining all software and hardware within all development sites. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management-Programming teams; K.6.4 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]: System Management-Centralization/decentralization. General Terms Management, Standardization. Advent of cloud computing model has provided the enterprises with an opportunity to reduce the costs of establishing IT infrastructure by offering computing resources as utilities and co