An evidence-based model of distributed software development project management: results from a systematic mapping study

Distributed software development (DSD) has intensified over the past few years, and DSD project management is more complex than collocated project management. However, no systematic research effort has focused on aggregating evidence from the scientific literature to build models to support project management on DSD context. For these reasons, the goal of this paper is to build an evidence-based model of DSD project management from the research findings about challenges of DSD and the practices, models and tools proposed and used to overcome these challenges. We based the construction of this model on the evidence collected and synthesized by a comprehensive systematic mapping study of 70 research papers published between 1997 and 2009. We believe that our results can help practitioners and researchers to better understand the challenges and implement more effective solutions to improve project management within distributed project management teams. These results also provide a mapping of the research about DSD project management, identifying areas where further research is needed. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.