Empirical Evidence of Factors Influencing Project Context in Distributed Software Projects

This study was carried out to find the context and factors that can affect the productivity of a team of developers and testers in a distributed software project. We interviewed project members in order to understand the relationships between those project context factors and their impact on scheduling risk. Our results suggest that, from a testers site point of view, knowledge expertise and communication overhead are important factors influencing the allocation strategy and the team productivity. Also there is still a lack of empirical evidences to define which factors managers, developers and testers should be aware when setting up and executing a distributed software development project.