Recognized as one of the trends of the 21st century, globalization of the world economies brought significant changes to nearly all industries, and in particular it includes software development. Many companies started global software engineering (GSE) to benefit from cheaper, faster and better development of software systems, products and services. However, empirical studies indicate that achieving these benefits is not an easy task. Here, we report our findings from investigating empirical evidence in GSE-related research literature. By conducting a systematic review we observe that the GSE field is still immature. The amount of empirical studies is relatively small. The majority of the studies represent problem-oriented reports focusing on different aspects of GSE management rather than in-depth analysis of solutions for example in terms of useful practices or techniques. Companies are still driven by cost reduction strategies, and at the same time, the most frequently discussed recommendations indicate a necessity of investments in travelling and socialization. Thus, at the same time as development goes global there is an ambition to minimize geographical, temporal and cultural separation. These are normally integral parts of cross-border collaboration. In summary, the systematic review results in several descriptive classifications of the papers on empirical studies in GSE and also reports on some best practices identified from literature.

Many organizations have turned towards globally distributed software development (GSD) in their quest for cheap, higher‐quality software that has a short development cycle. However, this kind of development has often been reported as being problematic and complex to manage. There are indications that trust is a fundamental factor in determining the success or failure of GSD projects. This article studies the key factors that cause a lack of trust and the effect of lacking trust and present data from four projects in which problems with trust were experienced. We found the key factors to be poor socialization and socio‐cultural fit, increased monitoring, inconsistency and disparities in work practices, reduction of and unpredictability in communication; and a lack of face‐to‐face meetings, language skills, conflict handling, and cognitive‐based trust. The effect of lacking trust was a decrease in productivity, quality, information exchange and feedback, morale among the employees, and an increase in relationship conflicts. In addition, the employees tended to self‐protect, to prioritize individual goals over group goals, and to doubt negative feedback from the manager. Further, the managers increased monitoring, which reduced the level of trust even more. These findings have implications for software development managers and practitioners involved in GSD. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Many organizations nowadays strive for utilization of benefits offered by global software engineering (GSE) and sourcing strategies are thus discussed more often. Since there are so many variations of the attributes associated with global software projects a large amount of new terms has been introduced. The diversity in sourcing jargon however has caused difficulties in determining which term to use in which situation, and thus causing further obstacles to searching and finding relevant research during, for example, systematic literature reviews. The inability of judging the applicability of the research in an industrial context is another important implication on the transferability of research into practice. Thus the need for accurate terminology and definitions for different global sourcing situations emerges as a way for the community to build upon each other's work and hence making progress more quickly. In this paper we first investigate the state of the use of the GSE jargon concluding that terminology is very diverse (many synonyms used to describe the same phenomena), often confusing (same terms used to describe different phenomena) and occasionally ambiguous (few terms used to describe several phenomena). In order to address the identified problems, we conducted a Delphi-inspired study with ten well-established researchers in GSE and developed an empirically based glossary for the key concepts in global software engineering. We then propose a taxonomy for GSE by categorizing the selected terms based on generalizationspecialization relationships and illustrate how the taxonomy can be used to categorize and map existing knowledge. The proposed contribution targets future researchers, who will publish or synthesize further empirical work and practitioners, who are interested in published empirical cases. Therefore this work is expected to make a contribution to the future development of research in the GSE field, and alleviate understandability and transferability of existing and future knowledge into practice.