Risk Mitigation Advice for Global Software Development from Systematic Literature Reviews

Context: Global software development (GSD) projects are often large-scale and, as they tend to be complex, have an increased risk of failure. Objective: We wish to identify what risk mitigation advice is provided to organizations in order to increase the likelihood of GSD project success. Method: We extend an earlier tertiary systematic review (SLR) in GSD to extract data from the SLR studies identified in order to discover: 1) what advice is provided to practitioners to increase the chances of project success, 2) what is the strength of the advice, and 3) to whom is the advice addressed. Results: We found 428 advice items that we categorized under four major headings: outsourcing rationale, software development, human resources, and project management. Most of the suggestions were related to agile methods (16%) and communication and collaboration (13%). Conclusions: The majority of our SLRs focussed on mapping the research rather than providing guidance to industry. Suggestions are mainly for vendor project managers and vendor practitioners. There is low empirical support for most of the advice provided.