Collaboration in Global Software Projects at Siemens: An Experience Report

As a globally operating company with about 30,000 software engineers worldwide, Siemens has accumulated a wide variety of experiences in global development. Many individuals and organizations have adjusted their practices to deal with the challenges related to the geographic distribution of the development effort. From a corporate perspective, Siemens has accumulated a rich base of knowledge about global development and how to approach it successfully. The Siemens software initiative - a company-wide improvement program for software development at Siemens - has worked on collecting this widely-distributed knowledge and synthesizing it in a form accessible to the wider software development community. In this paper, the approach as well as key learnings in people and communication-related aspects of collaboration are summarized.