Global Software Engineering: Evolution and Trends

Professional software products and IT systems and services today are developed mostly by globally distributed teams, projects, and companies. Successfully orchestrating Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the major success factor both for organizations and practitioners. Yet, more than a half of all distributed projects does not achieve the intended objectives and is canceled. This paper summarizes experiences from academia and industry in a way to facilitate knowledge and technology transfer. It is based on an evaluation of 10 years of research, and industry collaboration and experience reported at the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICGSE) series. The outcomes of our analysis show GSE as a field highly attached to industry and, thus, a considerable share of ICGSE papers address the transfer of Software Engineering concepts and solutions to the global stage. We found collaboration and teams, processes and organization, sourcing and supplier management, and success factors to be the topics gaining the most interest of researchers and practitioners. Beyond the analysis of the past conferences, we also look at current trends in GSE to motivate further research and industrial collaboration.