Globalization by Chunking: A Quantitative Approach

Business needs often require software development to be distributed over many sites, often in different countries and continents. Remoteness inhibits coordination among participants in different sites thereby potentially reducing their productivity and increasing production interval. We introduce a quantitative method to assess the extent of the coordination problem in such environments by identifying tightly coupled work items, or chunks, which span several sites. We then propose a method to distribute the work among sites to minimize the need for coordination. The method distinguishes among parts of software that are not tightly coupled with each other by analyzing the work items that are recorded in software change management systems. We use this quantitative analysis to define a process for identifying chunks that are candidates to be moved to different sites for development.