Mitigating Coordination Costs in Global Software Development Using Scrum

Global Software Development (GSD) is the most recent and major trend in software engineering domain. It provides many benefits but also faces various challenges in control, communication and coordination due to socio-cultural, geographical and temporal distance. Scrum is increasingly being applied in GSD as it supports teamwork between developers and customers. Scrum method offers a distinctive feature to mitigate the effects of socio-cultural and geographical but not temporal distance on coordination in GSD projects. This paper explains how Scrum helps to mitigate the effects of temporal distance which includes increased coordination costs in GSD projects. A web application called (Distributed Scrum Web Application) provides various advantages for Scrum teams. The main advantage of this application is to facilitate communication among distributed team members. Index Terms—Global software development, scrum, coordination costs, distributed applications, sprint.