Global Software Development Process Research at Siemens

Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) is the research and development unit of Siemens USA. The Software Engineering department of Siemens Corporate Research spends much of its time doing consulting for Siemens Business Units. As a result, we have been involved in a large number of software development projects varying in size, complexity, and domain. Many of these projects were developed with globally distributed teams. Over the years, we have identified best practices, and begun to organize these practices into more cohesive set of development processes focused on issues related to global development. This paper describes our experience with experimentation, lessons learned from one specific project, and suggests future steps for global software development (GSD) within Siemens.