Knowledge Transfer in Global Software Development - Leveraging Ontologies, Tools and Assessments

To be successful with global software development (GSD), development knowledge needs to be shared among the developers and stakeholders, and the quality of the exchanged information must be assured. Therefore, mature processes, methods and tools have to be in place. If a unified and integrated solution does not exist, this impedes the exchange of knowledge (and the migration of people between projects). In GSD, such a diversity can lead to new problems: offshore development teams have to repeatedly re-adjust to method variants used by the respective business units. This can lead to misinterpretation of information and risks for project success. We report on re-aligning the varying software engineering methods and unifying the methodology throughout Capgemini sd&m. We also standardized quality assurance procedures and tightly integrated them with the engineering methodology. By this, we arrived at a comprehensive company-wide Enterprise Software Engineering Model that effectively supports knowledge transfer from clients to the onshore and offshore team.