Towards Taxonomical-Based Situational Model to Improve the Quality of Agile Distributed Teams

Abstract

At present, software organizations are developing software products that employ global software development (GSD) teams. Organizations tend to adopt new methodologies for global software development, among which is the use of agile in the GSD industry, which yields both benefits and challenges. However, software development teams do not consider situational needs that delay software delivery, resulting in the late discovery of incompatible assumptions and architecture level rework. In this study, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the situational factors that need to be considered by software development teams before developing a software product. We further present taxonomical classification and comprehensively map the situational factors that impact design development and advancement in the proposed Situational Agile Distributed Development (SADD) model. We propose 18 directed hypotheses against each situational factor that supports our SADD model. In order to evaluate our directed hypotheses, statistical analysis method is used, and the level of confidence of each directed hypothesis is validated. The result of our study confirms that global software development teams are highly reliant on the SADD Model. Our study will largely contribute by devising a multilevel taxonomy of situational factors that elevate the performance of global software development teams. This taxonomical classification will allow to better map the relationships between multiple situational factors and elevate the process of creating a holistic model to handle situational needs in the context of Agile Distributed Software Development (ADSD).

Keywords

• Agile distributed taxonomy
• agile distributed teams
• situational agile distributed development
• situational model
• taxonomical model