Understanding Distributed Software Engineering Challenges for the Global Digital Economy

In order to address the aim of identifying the need for new software engineering techniques that are geared for use in globally distributed software development efforts the network partners will first establish how currently software development is performed on projects that are dispersed between the UK and India. Our Indian collaborators at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay are uniquely positioned to establish contacts within the top Indian IT companies, most notably Infosys, Wipro and TCS. In the first of two fact-finding mission, we will visit the development labs of these organizations and assess their current software development processes, methods, tools and infrastructures. We expect to find that they use traditional textbook techniques that were devised for an age when software was developed by a centralized team within one organization. On a second fact-finding mission, we will visit industrial and academic research centres at Microsoft India, Google India, HP Labs India and various IITs to obtain their views on adjustments that are needed for software development on a global scale. We will then consolidate these views at an open workshop to be held in India.We will organize a similar workshop in the UK where on a first day we invite UK industry to present their experience with global software development efforts and the following two days are used to determine the need for novel investigation into software engineering techniques that are to be used in the context of global software development. The workshop will focus on various software engineering disciplines, most notably, software engineering economics, software development processes, software architecture, middleware infrastructures and software quality assurance.We will use the results of this workshop to formulate a follow-on proposal for an interdisciplinary research centre in the area of global software development. We hope that we can convince the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology in India, that we want to visit with our Indian Partners on one of our fact finding trips of the importance of this area of research for the global digital economy and enlist their willingness to receive a proposal for funding from our Indian Partners at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay.