MITIGATION APPROACHES FOR COMMON ISSUES AND CHALLENGES WHEN USING SCRUM IN GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract: Context. Distributed software development teams frequently faced several issues from communication, co-ordination and control aspects. Teams are facing these issues because between teams there is socio-cultural distance, geographical distance and temporal diatance. So, the purpose of the study is to find out the acts when distributed Scrum teams face the problems. Objectives. There are several numbers of common GSD challenges or issues exist; such as, face to face meetings difficult, increase co-ordination costs and difficult to convey vision & strategy so on. The purpose of this study was to search, additional frequently occurred Global Software Development (GSD) issues or challenges. As well as, to find out the mitigation strategies, those practices by the Scrum practitioners (distributed software environment) in the industry. Methods. In this study, systematic literature review and scientific interview with distributed Scrum practitioners were conducted for empirical validation. One of the purpose for interview was to get challenges & mitigations from distributed Scrum practitioners point of view; as well as, verifying the literature review’s outcomes. Basically, we have extended the Hossain, Babar et al.’s [1] literature review and followed the similar procedures. Research papers were selected from the following sources, such as, IEEEXplore, ACM Digital library, Google Scholar, Compendex EI, Wiley InterSciene, Elsevier Science Direct, AIS eLibrary, SpringerLink. In addition, interviews were conducted from the persons who have at least six months working experience in a distributed Scrum team. Moreover, to analyze the interviews thematic analysis method has been followed. Results. Three additional common GSD challenges and four new mitigation strategies are found. Among the additional issues, one of them is communication issues (i.e. lack of trust/teamness or interpersonal relationship) and rest of them are co-ordination issues (i.e. lack domain knowledge/ lack of visibility and skill difference and technical issues). However, additional mitigation strategies are synchronizing works, preparation meeting, training and work status monitoring. Finally, frequently faced GSD issues are mapped with mitigation strategies by basing on the results obtained from SLR and interviews. Conclusions. Finally, we have got three additional GSD issues (such as, lack of trust/ teamness/ interpersonal relationship, lack of visibility/ lack of knowledge and difference in skills & technical issues) with the existing twelve common communication, co-ordination and control issues. The mitigation techniques (such as, synchronized works hour, ICT mediated synchronous communication and visit so on) for the common GSD issues has been found out and validated by Scrum practitioners. Among the existing issues, several of them use new mitigation strategies, those were gotten from practitioners. Moreover, for the two existing control issues (i.e. management of project artifacts may be subject to delays; managers must adapt to local regulations) lessening or mitigation techniques have been addressed by interviewees. This study was carried out to get the common GSD issues & mitigations from literature and distributed Scrum practitioners.