Global Software Development Challenges: A Case Study on Temporal, Geographical and Socio-Cultural Distance

TLDR

Global software development attracts worldwide interest, offering benefits such as a large labor pool, cost advantage, and continuous production, but its technological and organizational complexity—especially due to temporal, geographical, and socio‑cultural distances—poses significant challenges. This study investigates the specific challenges of managing global software development and identifies solutions to address them. The authors conducted qualitative interviews with three U.S.-based GSD firms operating in Ireland to empirically examine these challenges. The case study revealed that temporal, geographical, and socio‑cultural distances create distinct obstacles, and the firms employ various strategies to mitigate them.

Abstract

Global software development (GSD) is a phenomenon that is receiving considerable interest from companies all over the world. In GSD, stakeholders from different national and organizational cultures are involved in developing software and the many benefits include access to a large labour pool, cost advantage and round-the-clock development. However, GSD is technologically and organizationally complex and presents a variety of challenges to be managed by the software development team. In particular, temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances impose problems not experienced in traditional systems development. In this paper, we present findings from a case study in which we explore the particular challenges associated with managing GSD. Our study also reveals some of the solutions that are used to deal with these challenges. We do so by empirical investigation at three US based GSD companies operating in Ireland. Based on qualitative interviews we present challenges related to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance