Improving of standard risks and mitigation strategies in geographic software development with delphi method

Geographic Software Development (GSD) is a strategy used by software developers to achieve three main goals: Cost reduction, special talent acquisition and a "follow-the-sun" development that allows the software to be created continuously around the day and night hours. Moreover, risk management is an essential practice that is adopted by all professional projects in order to foresee any issues and circumstances that can jeopardize the success of the project. Risk management involves identifying the risks, analyzing them, treating them and monitoring them through a set processes and tools. In Geographic Software Development (GSD), there are several risks that emerge from the geographic, temporal and socio-cultural distances that are created by locating the project team in several locations, in addition to the conventional risks that are imposed by software development. Therefore, this research conducts a comprehensive review for the literature in order to compile the risks that are directly related to the GSD strategy. The case study adopts a Delphi methodology that allows the researcher to achieve consensus on the most relevant and critical risks associated with the GSD project. Twenty software development experts from all around the world participated in the study, with a minimum of fifteen expert in each Delphi round. The four rounds of the Delphi method used in this study are designed to gain consensus on the most crucial risks of the GSD strategy, as well as perform a risk assessment for all the risks compiled from the literature and verified by the participating experts. After the verification first round, the experts evaluate the relevance of the risk items in the second round and perform a risk assessment in third round. The fourth round allows the experts to select the most successful treatment strategy for each risk based on their practical experience. The results of the research show that there are ten main risks that gained consensus by software development experts and need to be addressed as a priority in GSD projects, where all of them have medium to high probability of occurrence and impact on the software project success.