Global Software Development: Current Challenges And Solutions

Global, collaborative and distributed development is increasingly common in software development. This way of working, widely adopted by big corporations has been also included lately in smaller organisations including SMEs. The traditional product and software development technologies do not correctly support this way of working, e.g., time and cultural differences add new requirements for these technologies. The Prisma project(1) aims to provide the tools, experiences and guidelines to help companies that face these issues in their everyday project management. One of its main outcomes is the PSW (Prisma Workbench). PSW is a platform and a set of tools that addresses the issues that need to be overcome in adoption of a collaborative and distributed development in organisations. This paper will present the results of the study performed during the Prisma Project and highlight the features of the PSW that will facilitate global collaborative software development teams to work more effectively in this kind of environments.