Software Engineering Institute

The trend towards global software development has gathered pace in recent years. More and more software intensive systems are being developed using teams that are geographically distributed. Developing software in this way poses unique challenges, however. Not only do cultural issues, differences in background, and organizational boundaries come into play, but communication and coordination in general is much more difficult and less effective. The system architecture is a central artifact in these efforts. This working session aims to bring together people who are concerned with architecting systems for global development. During this working session we will bring our collective experience together to identify the architectural issues that are unique to global software development and provide a forum for sharing our experience in dealing with those issues.

Participants should think about the following questions:

1. What issues (as they relate to software architecture) have you   experienced while developing software using teams that were geographically   distributed?
2. What practices did you use that were effective in this environment?  
3. What practices did you use that were not effective in this   environment?