Issues and Implications of Scrum on Global Software Development

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) is progressively becoming an ordinary practice in the software business; also there is an increasing awareness of agile practices applying in offshore, global and distributed Software Development (DSD) projects. Global software development aims at bringing together the current international software industry and to make optimal use of globally existing talent, whereas possibly reduce cost, time and effort to market. Although the idea seems quite promising at first look large geographical spread, cultural differences and multiple time zones in global software development environment leads to many drastic issues and challenges like team management, collaboration, communication, infrastructure, cost and quality management etc. Agile methodologies come into play when dealing with such type of problems. The aim of this paper is to explain the benefits of using scrum methodology in a distributed software
development environment. The paper also highlights the challenges that are faced by the agile team in the distributed environment of a global software development project. The
provided information can be useful for Global Software Development experts to get familiarized with various challenging factors that may affect communication, collaboration and coordination related processes in GSD and also with the use of various Scrum practices.