Challenges in global software development: Case study for one of the biggest German companies in the world

Over the last decade, global software development (GSD) becomes very popular for most of the biggest companies. Because of the underlying philosophy of software development, development teams are taking care to the communication that is mostly applicable for collocated teams. The dispersion of sites brings along various challenges to the software development processes of companies and difficulties to apply standard software development practices. This research investigates how demographic background of people affects GSD challenges by examining these effects on one of the biggest German company that operates in more than 20 countries. Systematic literature review (SLR) was applied that analyse and evaluate relevant empirical studies in literature. 365 empirical studies were investigated which were published between 2007 and 2017 and 70 papers found as the most relevant ones. Moreover, semi-structured interviews executed with 12 interviewees to discover problems from different perspectives. Consequently, three GSD challenges discovered as a contribution to the literature. In order to evaluate challenges that were collected from SLR and semi-structured interviews in current industry setting; survey was executed with 240 participants. A framework contributed to the literature that mainly target to discovered challenges and demographic information of participants. This study showed significant differences among participants' demographic background and GSD challenges that both existed in the literature and discovered in the scope of this thesis. The results of this thesis will be important for GSD companies to mitigate the effects of distributed development and enhance their software development processes by regarding their developers' demographic backgrounds.