Optimal coordination in distributed software development

The construction of a software system requires not only individual coding effort from team members to realize the various functionalities, but also adequate team coordination to integrate the development effort into a consistent, efficient, and bug-free system. On the one hand, continuous coding without adequate coordination can cause serious system inconsistencies and faults that may subsequently require significant corrective effort. On the other hand, frequent integrations can be disruptive to the team and delay development progress. This tradeoff motivates the need for a good coordination policy. Both the complexity and the importance of an optimal coordination policy are further highlighted in the context of distributed software development (DSD), where a software project is developed by multiple, geographically-distributed sub-teams. Coordination in DSD exists both within one sub-team and across different sub-teams. The latter type of coordination involves communication across spatial boundaries (different locations) and possibly temporal boundaries (different time zones), and is a major challenge DSD faces. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to model these two types of coordination activities in DSD and derive an optimal coordination policy.