New Opportunities Presented by Novel Work Breakdown Techniques for Distributed Software Development

Research into new techniques for work breakdown and resolution of flow dependencies has shown benefits in improving the coordination among team members in distributed software development projects. While these approaches reduce some risks in distributed project execution, there are other concerns that demand equal attention. Among them, a key concern with distributed project execution is that they take an inordinately longer time for execution. Preliminary analysis shows that coordination and visibility is significantly impaired when operating in the distributed mode adversely affecting the execution time. In addition, the analysis also brings out other contributing factors such as those related to the planning and work breakdown with low granularity inevitably meant low visibility into the progress as well as impact due to delays attributed to sub-optimal coordination. In this paper, we outline a theoretical framework for utilizing and extending work-breakdown and parallelization techniques towards optimizing the execution time.