Better validation in a world-wide development environment

Increasingly, software projects are handled in a global and distributed project setup. Global software development, however, also challenges traditional techniques of software engineering, such as peer reviews or teamwork. In particular, validation activities during development, such as inspections, need to be adjusted to achieve results which are both efficient and effective. Effective teamwork and the coaching of engineers contribute highly to successful projects. In this article, we evaluate experiences with validation activities in a global setting within Alcatel's switching and routing business. We investigate three hypotheses related, respectively, to the effects of collocated inspections, intensive coaching and feature-oriented development teams on globally distributed projects. As all these activities mean initial investment compared to a standard process with scattered activities, the major validation criterion for the three hypotheses is cost reduction due to earlier defect detection and less defects introduced. The data is taken from a sample of over 60 international projects of various sizes, from which we have collected all types of software product and process metrics in the past four years