The Evolution and Impact of the Research in Distributed Software Development in Brazil

The worldwide Software Engineering community has witnessed a significant change in the way software projects have been developed over the last two decades: the teams have been organized with geographically dispersed members. The term Distributed Software Development (DSD) has been increasingly used in the academy and industry to specify this development context as well as their particularities and problems. At the same time, this change has caused an impact not only on the market itself, but in the way in which software products are being designed, developed, tested and delivered to clients. Thus the DSD has attracted a large number of researches in Software Engineering. In Brazil this is not different. There are records of research being developed in the country since 1999. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss how research in DSD has evolved in the country from a historical evaluation of papers on this subject, the impact of this research both nationally and internationally and the role of Brazilian Software Engineering community in the development of this area. We also discuss the future vision for research in the area.