What Happens, When Software Product Development Companies Go Global?

Globalization has significantly changed the way the market operates today. In particular, it motivated many software companies expand through acquisitions and utilize skillful resources regardless of their location around the globe. Global software engineering endeavors have been widely explored in the research literature for the past decade and associated with many challenges caused by geographic, temporal and cultural distances. While software development as such is quite a challenging task, involvement of dispersed and diverse software teams created a perceived crisis with respect to, so called, soft issues that have not been targeted in the past. The effect of distribution versus co-location is still under investigation, and the most commonly referred challenges are related to communication, coordination and control [1]. Thus the focus of research to a large extent has shifted from software product as the center, to people developing software.