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Software development environment is shifting from centralized to a dispersed environment so as to offer advantages over the conventional techniques in the recent years (Al-Zaidi & Qureshi, 2017). Success progressively relies upon utilizing software as a competitive weapon. Over 10 years back, looking for lower costs and access to skilled resources, numerous software firms started to explore or experiment with dispersed software development facilities and with outsourcing (Prikladnicki et al., 2003). Therefore, software development is progressively a multisite, multicultural, globally dispersed endeavor. Designers, Engineers, managers, and officials face various, imposing challenges on many levels, from the specialized to the social and cultural (Herbsleb & Moitra, 2001; Prikladnicki et al., 2003). Different scholars name such teams remotely dispersed at various locations or Global Software Development environment (GSD) environment (Iftikhar et al., 2018b).
Global Software Development
The term GSD implies the teams of software experts are scattered, they are located in different geographical locations for the purpose of developing a software on same set of goals and objectives. These teams belong to different cultures and different development backgrounds (Colomo-Palacios et al., 2012). It uses digital communication networks facility to communicate with each other. GSD is popular among the IT organization and a large number of IT employees are taking up global assignment, due to its benefits it offers, irrespective of the duration (Arumugam & Kaliamourthy, 2016). There are some of the significant benefits of GSD that includes continuous development that enhances product quality. It also minimizes costs using cheaper labor and material resources that contributes to increasing productivity. (Al-Zaidi & Qureshi, 2017; AL_Zaidi & Qureshi, 2014; Anjum et al., 2006). In GSD environment distributed teams are still facing many challenges during global software development process such as strategic issues, cultural issues, Inadequate communication, distance, different backgrounds and project and process management issues (Casey & Richardson, 2009; Herbsleb & Moitra, 2001) as shown in Figure 1 (Carmel, 1999).
Figure 1. GSD Challenges (Carmel, 1999)
GSD projects are generally extensive and global evolution steers them to become complicated which in term makes them less probable to succeed. Distributed projects are more likely not to succeed reason being ‘‘physical existence of individuals, time zones, cultural issues, organizational, and stakeholder distances negatively inñuence communication and knowledge exchange between onshore and offshore project team members’’ (Fabriek et al., 2008). When a project is to be executed beyond borders, the assessments of a project manager maximize as the manager now has to take into consideration the difference in time zones, lingual problems, the overall context and also the built of the specific project (AL_Zaidi & Qureshi, 2014; Hossain et al., n.d.). Global Software development environment made project management task more hectic due to its challenges and complex processes (Colomo-Palacios et al., 2014). Developing software projects to address business needs and requirements in global software development environment is so exceedingly complex and troublesome that it is common for software projects to overrun budgets and exceed scheduled completion dates.