Pattern Language for Project Management in Global Software Development

Abstract

Globalization is a general trend in the world which will also affect the way software is developed and the kinds of organization which will make this development. Global Software Development (GSD) offers new benefits but also new challenges which make the work more difficult than earlier. This thesis tries to find solutions to these challenges from the viewpoint of project management. Rather than developing a totally new GSD process that addresses these problems, I try to come up with solutions to specific problems, and present these solutions in such a way that they can be easily integrated with existing processes. An attractive way to document proven solutions to specific development process problems is to use process patterns as done in this work. Pattern mining is not an easy task and different methods have been used to mine patterns. In this thesis, a pattern mining method has been developed which is applied in case projects. The solutions in these patterns have been mined from the practices that have been found to work well in a case organization. How to apply patterns is not always clear, because usually there are different kinds of patterns for different purposes. Patterns should be organized in a way which makes it easier to use them. In this work a process view of project management has been used to organize the found process patterns. When patterns are found, it is not always easy to tell if they are good or not. In this work, a new approach to evaluate process patterns was developed. The resulting patterns have been evaluated by using the proposed scenario-based assessment method. To summarize, the main contributions of this thesis consist of a method to find GSD process patterns, a collection of process patterns for project management in GSD, a pattern language organization based on the structure of the PRINCE2 project management process, and finally, a new assessment method to evaluate process patterns.