Exploring the Aspects of Rework in Global Software Development

Global software development (GSD) is a software development setting in which practitioners residing in different countries work together as a team to accomplish a software project. This paradigm is rapidly adopted by numerous software companies in order to reduce cost and time. However, these cost savings are seldom achieved due to geographical, temporal, socio-cultural and linguistic distances. These distances often cause misinterpretations and conflicting perceptions about the product to be built and often induce lots of rework. Excessive rework significantly increases risk of project failure. However, little research has been conducted on the aspects of rework in GSD. In order to reduce rework in GSD, aspects of rework need to be conceptualized. Also, cost associated with rework need to be measured. Thus, in this paper rework cycle and its associated drivers are proposed for GSD setting. A metric is also proposed to calculate cost of rework in GSD. The research work has also been validated through industrial survey.