Benefits of Global Software Development: The Known and Unknown

Organizations are increasingly moving to the global software development (GSD) model because of significant benefits that can accrue. However, GSD is fraught with difficulties arising from geographical, temporal and sociocultural distances. The emphasis in the literature to date has typically been on how to overcome these significant challenges associated with GSD. While a number of GSD benefits have been identified in the literature, there are also a number of less obvious, what we term ‘unknown,’ potential benefits that can accrue from GSD. Here we synthesize and integrate an overall set of potential GSD benefits and categorize them according to the organizational, team and process level to which they are most applicable. The ‘unknown’ includes organization benefits, such as improved resource allocation, team benefits, such as reduced coordination cost and improved team autonomy, and process benefits, such as improved documentation and clearly defined processes.