Risk Identification and Risk Mitigation Instruments for Global Software Development: Systematic Review and Survey Results

In this research we conducted a systematic review on Global Software Development (GSD) literature and performed a survey to gather challenges associated with GSD projects as well as their mitigation strategies. We reviewed studies with empirical evidence in GSD. In total there are 86 papers included as the primary studies. From the systematic review we collected 48 challenges and 42 mitigation strategies.These challenges and strategies were also identified by our survey respondents. In addition, 4 additional mitigation strategies were uncovered from the survey. The collected challenges and mitigation strategies are later compiled into checklists which can be employed as risk identification and risk mitigation instruments.