Survivability Models for Global Software Engineering

Software projects that are engineered using global software development techniques are required to deploy processes and tools to support collaboration over large geographies. Specifically, these projects involve the deployment of processes and tools to support project management, communication, and risk management. Whereas a traditional software development effort can use standard processes and tools to support communication and collaboration, global software development efforts require a unified and holistic project management, development process, collaboration, and communication approach taking into consideration the interplay of time zones, number of sites and cultural diversity. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for modeling and quantification of global software engineering frameworks. In our approach, we apply transient survivability metrics to support the design of global software engineering projects. Therefore, our approach combines survivability analysis and global software engineering frameworks analysis. The survivability metric used in this paper is the time required to recover from a software project disaster (e.g., break down in communication between remote teams) for a given global software engineering framework. The global software engineering modeling framework we use is composed of models supporting the evaluation of communication tools, software development processes and cultural diversity management. We illustrate the application of our approach by applying it to the analysis of an example derived from a real global software engineering project. Our results indicate that the combination of survivability analysis and modeling of global software engineering frameworks can provide meaningful insights when designing global software engineering frameworks.