Global Software Development: Are Architectural Rules the Answer?

Global software development (GSD) faces additional challenges as compared to single-site software development. Some of the better known challenges include temporal, geographical, and socio-cultural differences. To overcome these challenges, organizations need to revert to measures in order to deliver software in time in a distributed setting. Some of these measures may exist in the form of architectural rules: principles and statements on the software architecture that must be complied with throughout the organization. From the GSD literature we distilled four main GSD challenges and seven sub-challenges, or issues. For each issue, we list possible solutions and observe that solutions to GSD challenges may be obtained by adhering to architectural rules. We present a study on how two organizations involved in GSD solve the GSD challenges and issues. One of the organizations mainly uses rules regulating the architecture of the product. The other organization does not emphasize these architectural rules but rather focuses on the joint team effort in establishing and committing to measures that mainly pertain to the architecture process. We conclude that rules regulating a combination of both proves valuable in handling GSD challenges.