Software development process evolution and paradigm shift - a case study of Malaysian companies

Due to the consequences of global software development (GSD), the traditional approaches of software development evolved into lightweight agile methods. The agile methods got overwhelming response from software development companies due to their obvious support to GSD. In this regard, limited research work has been presented on software process evolution and process paradigm shift in context of GSD. Most of the work presented on GSD mainly focus on the companies in Europe, America, Australia and other western countries. Existing research work highlight the standard benefits and challenges of GSD but do not investigate its effect on software development processes and associated reasons causing the affect particularly in Malaysian software development companies. The research work presented in this paper addresses this issue and investigates the effects of GSD on software processes, software process evolution and paradigm shift and finds the current software processes being used in Malaysian companies. Also, it further determines the GSD factors and reasons behind the change and selection of a software development process. GSD factors affecting the software processes have been termed as challenges. Structured interviews have been conducted to collect qualitative data from industry professionals involved in GSD. General inductive approach has been used for qualitative data analysis and findings. The results show that after GSD, Malaysian companies are mostly following agile methods. The traditional and ad-hoc approaches used before GSD have been replaced by the lightweight agile methodologies. Few of the companies are still following ad-hoc approaches mainly due to size of the project and company as most of the Malaysian companies are small and medium size. The research is significant that it provides clear insight into software process paradigm in Malaysian companies. The outcome of the research provides foundations for the standardization of software processes, process improvement, selection and quality enhancement approaches in Malaysian companies.