Developing Green and Sustainable Software using Agile Methods in Global Software Development: Risk Factors for Vendors

Abstract

Global software development (GSD) is gaining momentum due to the potential benefits it offers. GSD aims at delivering remarkable software through a widely distributed pool of experts, with reduced efforts, minimum cost and time. In recent years, GSD developers have reshaped the development processes and have adopted agile techniques and green engineering principles to cope with the frequent changes in requirements, accelerate the development in short increments and to produce energy efficient and sustainable software. However, the adoption of agile methods for developing sustainable software possesses a number of challenges. This paper presents a list of potential challenges/risks identified through systematic literature review (SLR) that need to be avoided by the GSD vendors using agile methods for the development of green and sustainable software. Our findings reveal eight risk factors that are faced by GSD vendors in the development of green and sustainable software using agile methods. GSD vendors are encouraged to address properly all the identified factors in general and the most-frequently cited critical risks in particular, such as insufficient system documentation, limited support for real-time systems and large systems, management overhead, lack of customer's presence, lack of formal communication and lack of long term planning.

Agile practices for global software development vendors in the development of green and sustainable software

“…Apart from the aforementioned online groups, we requested some relevant experts, during the meeting at the “11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2016), held at Rome, Italy.” During the conference, we received 9 filled questionnaires from relevant experts. Hence, the total questionnaires received were 106 in number.…”

“…These experts participated from 25 different countries (Asia, 36; Europe, 32; North America, 20; and other, 9). 89 During the conference, we received 9 filled questionnaires from relevant experts. Hence, the total questionnaires received were 106 in number.…”

Using agile methods for the development of green and sustainable software: Success factors for GSD vendors

“…Apart from the aforementioned online groups, we requested some of the relevant experts during the meeting at the 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2016), held at Rome, Italy . During the conference, we received 9 filled questionnaires from the relevant experts belonging to different countries.…”

Release conventions of open‐source software: An exploratory study

“…Shukla 3 proposes organizational practices for improved flexibility in different maturity levels of software development. Rashid and Khan 4 emphasized the development of Green and Sustainable Software in the Agile process while surveying the existing methodologies of Software Engineering. Al‐Zewairi et al 5 surveyed the agile methodologies that were proposed from 2002 to 2015 and categorized them into various classes where they found that “Hybrid Agile Methods” are proposed mostly for frequent versioning purposes.…”

“…There are many studies 2–9 that evaluate process models using real‐world case studies. However, we found that no study considered using software history to determine software methodological practices such as software release patterns but rather interviewed or surveyed interested stakeholders from a particular development team.…”